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ittoDent  ffielfgfoug  ^roblemg 

EDITED  BY 

AMBROSE   WHITE    VERNON 


THE  EARLIEST  SOURCES 

FOR  THE 

LIFE  OF  JESUS 


BY 


F.  CRAWFORD  BURKITT,  M.  A.,  D.  D. 

NORRISIAN   PROFESSOR  OF  DIVINITY   IN   THE 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CAMBRIDGE,  ENGLAND 


0 


BOSTON   AND  NEW   YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 

<$&e  fitocrsi&e  press  Cambridge 

1910 


COPYRIGHT,   I9IO,  BY  F.   CRAWFORD  BURKITT 
ALL  RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  February  igio 


£ 


CONTENTS 


Preliminary  Considerations 

I-29 

Marks  of  Genuineness : 

Jewish  Topography 

H 

Jewish  Language 

18 

Jewish  Thought 

26 

The  Synoptic  Problem 

30-46 

The  Priority  of  Mark 

3i 

The  Identification  of  Q^ 

37 

II. 


III.  The  Gospel  according  to  Mark       47-80 

The  Kingdom  of  God  and  the  M  Son  of  Man  "       57 
Influence  of  the  Book  of  Enoch  66 

Outline  of  the  Story  as  given  by  Mark  72 

IV.  Possible  "  Sources  "  of  the  Gospel  of 

Mark  81-99 

John  Mark  84 

Inaccuracies : 

Abiathar  89 

Jewish  Ablutions  91 

Date  of  the  Last  Supper  92 

Simon  Peter  94 


CONTENTS 

V.    The  Composition  of  Matthew  and 

Luke  100-128 

Matthew  and  Luke  contrasted  101 

Narrative  of  the  non-Marcan  Parts  of  Luke  103 

Did  (^contain  a  Passion  Story  ?  109 

The  M  Peraean  Source  "  of  Luke  113 

General  Faithfulness  of  Matthew  and  Luke  116 

Matthew's  Treatment  of  Mark  117 

Luke's  Treatment  of  Mark  1 19 

Note  on  Recent  Reconstructions  of  "  QJ'  124 

Bibliography  1 29-1 31 


THE    EARLIEST   SOURCES  FOR 
THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

I 

PRELIMINARY   CONSIDERATIONS 

"The  originator  of  that  name,"  —  Taci- 
tus is  speaking  of  those  whom  the  common 
people  in  Rome,  as  he  says,  called  "Chris- 
tians "  as  a  term  of  reproach,  —  "  the  origi- 
nator of  that  name,  one  Christus,  had  been 
executed  in  the  reign  of  Tiberius  by  order 
of  the  Administrator,  Pontius  Pilate."  The 
contemptuous  sentence  of  the  Roman  his- 
torian1 is  the  only  information  about  the 
life  and  career  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  that  has 
come  down  to  us  independently  of  Christian 
tradition.  So  far  as  it  goes,  however,  it 
agrees  with  what  we  read  in  the  Gospels : 
Pontius   Pilate   occupies  in  the  statement 

1  Annals,  xv.  44. 

I 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

of  Tacitus  the  same  place  that  he  occupies 
in  the  Church's  Creed.  He  stands  there  to 
mark  the  date  of  the  Crucifixion. 

The  Christian  Church  grew  up  in  ob- 
scurity under  conditions  that  were  by  no 
means  favourable  to  the  preservation  of  ac- 
curate historical  reminiscences  of  its  earliest 
beginnings.  By  the  time  the  Christians  be- 
gan to  preserve  in  writing  the  record  of 
the  origin  of  their  religion,  deep  and  ever- 
widening  gulfs  had  intervened  between 
them  and  the  events.  Jesus  was  born  a  Jew, 
and  he  lived  and  died  among  his  own 
countrymen  in  Palestine;  his  religion  took 
root  in  the  great  cities  on  the  eastern  half 
of  the  Mediterranean.  The  first  disciples, 
the  men  who  had  really  known  the  Master 
according  to  the  flesh,  were  Aramaic-speak- 
ing Semites;  in  a  couple  of  generatiQns  the 
great  majority  of  Christians  were  Greek- 
speaking  townsfolk,  mixed  perhaps  in  blood, 
but   educated   wholly  in   Greek   ways   of 

2 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

thought.  In  the  interval  the  Jewish  State 
had  been  annihilated  by  the  forces  of  the 
Roman  Empire,  and  what  remained  of  the 
earliest  community  of  disciples  had  been 
broken  up. 

But  the  cause  that  most  of  all  tended  to 
make  the  Christians  careless  of  preserving 
the  memory  of  the  past  was  that  their  minds 
were  set  upon  the  future,  the  future  which 
they  believed  was  immediately  in  store  for 
them  and  for  all  the  world.  They,  the  first 
Christian  converts,  had  obeyed  the  call  to 
save  themselves  from  the  crooked  genera- 
tion of  their  contemporaries.1  They  had 
turned  from  idols  to  serve  a  living  and  true 
God  and  to  wait  for  His  Son  from  heaven, 
whom  He  raised  from  the  dead,  even  Jesus, 
their  deliverer  from  the  wrath  to  come.* 
That  generation,  some  of  them  at  least, 
would  not  taste  of  death  till  they  saw  the 
Kingdom  of  God  come.3  Jesus  their  Lord 

*  Acts  ii.  40.     a  I  Thess.  i.  9.     •  Mark  ix.  I,  and  parallels. 

3 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

was  not  only  the  Faithful  Witness,  the  First- 
born of  the  dead;  " behold/'  they  said,  "he 
cometh  with  the  clouds;  and  every  eye  shall 
see  him,  and  they  also  which  pierced  him; 
all  the  tribes  of  the  earth  shall  mourn  over 
him."  ' 

The  time  was  at  hand  —  the  time  of  the 
judgment  of  the  heathen  and  the  vindication 
of  the  Saints.  What  was  the  use  of  looking 
back  to  the  humble  life  of  the  Son  of  God 
on  earth,  save  perhaps  to  record  his  final 
victory  over  death,  which  was  the  earnest 
and  prelude  of  his  immediately  expected 
Presence  in  glory  ?  In  the  events  of  his 
earthly  career  the  believers  took  little  in- 
terest: if  they  looked  back  at  all,  it  was  to 
declare  that  the  Lord  himself  had  instituted 
the  rite  of  the  common  meal  for  which  they 
met  week  by  week,  and  that  he  had  pre- 
scribed the  form  of  their  daily  prayer  to  their 
Father  in  Heaven.  This  is  no  fancy  picture. 
1  Rev.  i.  7. 
4 


PRELIMINARY   CONSIDERATIONS 

It  reflects  the  general  attitude  of  Christians 
towards  the  life  of  Jesus  on  earth,  which 
we  can  gather  from  monuments  of  early 
Christianity  so  representative  and  so  differ- 
ent from  one  another  as  the  New  Testa- 
ment epistles  and  the  ancient  Christian 
manual  known  as  the  "  Didache." 

The  New  Age  came  in  a  form  very  differ- 
ent from  what  had  been  so  confidently  ex- 
pected. The  little  companies  of  believers 
did  not  live  to  see  their  Lord  appear  visibly 
on  the  clouds  of  heaven.  Instead  of  being 
caught  up  alive  in  clouds  to  meet  the 
Lord  in  the  air,1  they  went  one  by  one  to 
their  graves,  leaving  their  successors  to 
carry  on  the  work  and  the  traditions  of  the 
Christian  Society.  Naturally  the  changed 
conditions  reacted  upon  Christian  theology, 
upon  the  Christian  view  of  the  Church  and 
of  the  dispensation  in  which  it  found  itself. 
St.  Paul  himself  seems  to  have  been  the  first 

1  I  Thess.  iv.  17. 

5 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

to  realize  the  new  world.  He  learned  to  see 
in  the  Death  of  the  Christ  not  merely  the  last 
act,  the  last  catastrophe  of  the  old  dispen- 
sation, but  also  a  process  which  the  individ- 
ual believer  had  mystically  to  undergo  on 
earth,  so  that  the  historical  event  of  the 
Crucifixion  remained  an  ever-present  re- 
ality to  the  members  of  the  Christian  com- 
munity.1 

"  Crucified  under  Pontius  Pilate  "  —  in 
this  phrase  we  see  the  indispensable  germ 
of  history  in  the  Christian  Creed.  As  the 
believers  meditated  yet  further  upon  the 
nature  of  their  Lord,  they  perceived  that 
he  was  no  chance  favourite  of  Heaven,  but 
one  who  had  been  destined  to  fulfil  his 
high  career  in  the  fulness  of  time.  The 
Church  was  the  inheritor  of  the  promises 
made  to  the  fathers  of  old  ;  it  hardly  needed 
tradition  for  them  to  believe  that  the  Lord 
Jesus  had  come  of  the  seed  of  David  ac- 

1  See  Rom.  vi.  3-6;  Col.  i.  12  ft. 

6 


PRELIMINARY   CONSIDERATIONS 

cording  to  the  Scriptures.  At  the  same 
time  both  their  own  devotion,  and  the  doc- 
trine of  such  Jewish  books  as  the  Book  of 
Enoch,  assured  them  that  the  Elect  One 
had  existed  from  the  first  with  the  Most 
High.  It  is  not  surprising  to  find  that  there 
grew  up  a  belief  that  his  birth  was  miracu- 
lous, shewing  that  he  was  in  some  sense 
both  God  and  man.  The  statements  about 
Jesus  Christ  which  we  find  in  the  Creed 
are  such  as  might  have  been  anticipated. 

It  is  also  not  very  surprising  that  at 
length  a  book  should  have  been  written 
which  professes  to  give  an  account  of  the 
earthly  doings  and  sayings  of  the  Lord, 
which,  setting  forth  from  his  eternal  pre- 
existence  with  the  Father,  declares  his 
claims  to  divine  authority,  exhibits  his 
unbounded  power  over  disease,  over  na- 
ture, and  over  death  itself,  and  then  goes 
on  to  relate  how  he  voluntarily  gave  him- 
self up  to  be  crucified,  and,  when  all  was 

7 


SOURCES   FOR   THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

finished,  tells  how  he  appeared  to  his  faith- 
ful friends  and  disciples ;  a  book  written 
that  the  readers  might  believe  that  Jesus 
is  the  Christ,  and  that  believing  they  might 
have  life  in  his  name.1  Such  a  book  as  the 
Gospel  according  to  Saint  John  we  might 
expect  to  spring  up  within  the  Church  and 
be  accepted  as  the  official  account  of  the 
Incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God. 

I  have  begun  this  discussion  of  the  ear- 
liest historical  sources  for  the  life  of  Jesus 
with  the  "Apostles'  Creed  "  and  the  Fourth 
Gospel  rather  than  with  the  documents  that 
modern  criticism  regards  as  giving  us  ma- 
terials for  history,  because  I  venture  to 
think  that  the  first  thing  needed  to  enable 
the  modern  investigator  to  judge  the  sur- 
viving documents  aright  is  the  attempt  to 
look  at  them  rather  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  early  Christians  than  from  that  of 
our  own  aims  and  desires.  It  is  sometimes 

1  John  xx.  21. 

8 


PRELIMINARY   CONSIDERATIONS 

felt  to  be  a  matter  of  surprise  or  regret  that 
modern  investigators  of  the  Gospel  History 
reject  so  much  of  the  traditional  matter  as 
unhistorical ;  it  is  regarded  as  a  matter  of 
surprise  or  regret  that  so  small  an  amount 
of  the  "  Gospels,"  canonical  or  uncanonical, 
is  found  to  come  up  to  our  modern  stand- 
ard of  what  history  should  be.  Closely  con- 
nected with  this  feeling  is  the  vague  expec- 
tation that  the  spade  of  the  explorer  in 
Egypt  or  Palestine  will  some  day  dig  up 
something  of  revolutionary  importance, 
something  that  will  let  us  go,  so  to  speak, 
behind  the  scenes  of  the  rise  of  Christian- 
ity. This  expectation  has  been  doomed 
again  and  again  to  disappointment,  interest- 
ing as  the  discoveries  of  the  last  fifty  years 
have  been  to  those  who  know  within  what 
limits  we  may  hope  to  gain  accessions  to 
our  knowledge.  It  is  unlikely  that  such  a 
revolutionary  document  ever  existed,  or,  if 
it  ever  existed,  that  it  would  have  been 
9 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

copied  and  preserved.  There  were  no  dis- 
interested observers  of  early  Christianity. 
Those  who  did  not  "  believe  "  had  no  rea- 
son for  analysing  the  elements  of  what  must 
have  seemed  to  them  to  be  a  new  and  vul- 
gar superstition;  so  that  our  knowledge  of 
it  comes  exclusively  from  the  works  of 
already  convinced  Christians.  The  question 
that  the  scientific  investigator  has  to  ask  is 
not  why  so  much  of  our  material  seems  to 
be,  strictly  speaking,  unhistorical,  but  how 
it  comes  to  pass  that  any  real  historical 
memory  of  Jesus  Christ  was  preserved.  It 
is  easy  enough  to  explain  the  genesis  of  the 
Creed,  and  the  existence  and  general  scope 
of  such  a  document  as  the  Fourth  Gospel. 
The  real  problem  is  the  survival  of  the 
Gospel  according  to  Mark. 

The  difference  of  standpoint  between  the 

ancient  and  modern  world  that  is  clearly 

apprehended  by  all   reflecting  persons  at 

the  present   day  concerns   the   course   of 

10 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

Nature  and  the  domain  of  Physical  Science. 
We  all  of  us  have  some  idea  of  the  ob- 
served uniformity  of  nature,  and  we  regard 
what  are  called  "  miracles  "  as  at  least  un- 
likely, even  if  we  do  not  regard  them  as 
impossible.  Now  it  is  quite  evident  that  the 
early  Christians  did  not  regard  "  miracles  " 
as  unlikely,  in  the  sense  that  we  regard 
them  as  unlikely.  The  Gospels,  and  many 
other  early  Christian  documents,  are  full  of 
miracles,  and  in  some  quarters  this  raises 
a  prejudice  against  them,  or  at  least  against 
the  stories  which  contain  a  "miraculous" 
element.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  no 
miracles  in  the  "  Sermon  on  the  Mount," 
or  in  the  fragmentary  document  dug  up  a 
few  years  ago  at  Oxyrhynchus  in  Egypt, 
and  commonly  called  "  Sayings  of  Jesus  "; 
such  pieces  of  tradition  as  these  are  often 
therefore  accepted  with  little  or  no  serious 
criticism  as  being  genuine  and  authentic, 
merely  because  they  claim  to  be  so.  But 
ii 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

this  is  fundamentally  unscientific.  It  is  of 
course  logical  enough  for  the  thorough- 
going traditionalist  to  accept  the  "  Sermon 
on  the  Mount "  as  genuine  and  authentic, 
because  it  is  part  of  the  authoritative  tra- 
dition of  the  Church,  and  to  look  with 
very  great  suspicion  upon  the  Oxyrhynchus 
"  Sayings,"  because  they  were  not  included 
in  the  Church's  tradition.  But  those  who 
feel  themselves  free  to  criticise  the  Gospel 
miracles  are  bound  to  examine  the  creden- 
tials of  the  Gospel  Sayings. 

A  truly  scientific  historical  criticism  is 
both  stricter  and  more  catholic  than  popu- 
lar liberalism.  It  does  not  expect  from  any 
document  an  impossible  standard  of  truth- 
fulness and  accuracy.  Even  the  modern 
astronomer  in  a  scientific  observatory  has 
his  irreducible  personal  equation;  even  the 
actual  eye-witness  will  tell  his  tale  with 
variations  after  the  lapse  of  a  few  years. 
Even  if  we  incline  to  disbelieve  in  miracu- 
12 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

lous  interference  with  the  course  of  nature, 
that  does  not  mean  that  we  have  any  right 
to  treat  stories  which  contain  a  miraculous 
element  as  if  they  were  mere  free  inven- 
tions. The  real  question  that  must  be  asked 
is,  in  the  first  place,  one  of  origin  rather 
than  of  faithfulness. 

It  may  not  be  out  of  place,  before  ex- 
amining the  Synoptic  Gospels  and  other 
parts  of  the  tradition  in  detail,  to  consider 
some  of  the  marks  and  signs  that  do  indi- 
cate that  a  tradition  or  saying  is  really  in 
touch  with  the  events  of  the  life  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth.  When  we  consider  that  our 
documents  are  Greek  and  that  the  original 
public  for  whom  they  were  prepared  were 
Greek-speaking  Christians  in  the  cities  upon 
or  near  the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean,  it 
is  obvious  that  what  we  are  looking  for 
are  signs  which  indicate  a  real  knowledge 
of  the  conditions  of  life  in  Palestine  among 

13 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

the  Jewish  people  during  the  first  half  of  the 
first  century  a.  d.  These  signs  may  con- 
veniently be  grouped  under  the  heads  of 
(i)  Jewish  Topography,  (2)  Jewish  Lan- 
guage, (3)  Jewish  Thought. 

1.  y eivish  (and  Palestinian)  Topogra- 
phy. — As  compared  with  the  ignorance  of 
topography  displayed  in  most  of  the  apocry- 
phal Acts  of  the  Apostles,  it  is  reassuring 
to  note  the  general  correctness  of  the  geo- 
graphical information  given  in  our  Gospels, 
not  excepting  the  Fourth  Gospel.  Most  of 
the  places  mentioned  in  the  Gospels  can  be 
identified,  or  are  mentioned  in  purely  Jew- 
ish documents  such  as  the  Talmud.  When 
we  find  in  words  ascribed  to  Jesus  references 
to  Chorazin  and  Capernaum,1  towns  not 
mentioned  in  the  Old  Testament,  though 
their  existence  is  attested  in  the  Talmud, 
we  may  infer  that  we  are  dealing  with  a 
Palestinian  tradition.  The  Gospel  tradition 

1  More  accurately,  Capharnaum. 

14 


PRELIMINARY   CONSIDERATIONS 

never  makes  Jesus  have  anything  to  do  with 
the  heathen  and  Greek-speaking  cities  of 
Palestine.  He  never  is  made  to  go  to  Caes- 
area.  Peter's  confession  is  not  at  Cacsarea 
Philippi:  Jesus  is  with  his  disciples  "in 
the  villages  of  Caesarea  Philippi,"  ■  i.  e.  in 
the  native  suburbs  or  districts  round  the 
new  heathenish  city.  Tiberias,  founded 
A.  d.  26  and  afterwards  the  centre  of  Jewish 
life  in  Galilee,  is  only  mentioned  once  and 
that  incidentally;'  and  we  actually  know 
from  Josephus  that  Herod's  newly  built 
town  was  regarded  at  first  with  disfavour 
by  the  Jews.  Of  course,  correctness  and 
appropriateness  in  geographical  names  do 
not  necessarily  imply  the  historicity  and 
accuracy  of  the  stories  in  which  they  occur. 
But  such  things  do  shew  that  the  tradition 
has  roots  in  the  soil  of  the  Holy  Land. 

We  must,  however,  distinguish  this  real 
geographical  knowledge  from  a  geograph- 

x  Mark  viii.  27.  2  John  vi.  23. 

is 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF   JESUS 

ical  knowledge  which  is  only  the  result  of 
studying  the  Old  Testament  or  some  other 
literary  source.  Both  kinds  of  knowledge 
may  be  notably  illustrated  from  the  writings 
of  Luke.  St.  Luke  is  at  home  in  Asia  Mi- 
nor and  on  the  sea.  The  narrative  portion 
of  the  twentieth  chapter  of  Acts  is  full  and 
correct  enough  for  a  guide-book,  and  the 
voyage  of  Paul,  with  the  shipwreck,  reads 
like  what  no  doubt  it  really  is,  an  account 
written  by  an  eye-witness.  But  when  the 
same  author  is  writing  of  Palestine,  he  is 
merely  well  read,  and  like  other  merely 
well-read  persons  he  occasionally  falls  into 
error.  He  is  careful  indeed  of  his  language, 
and  talks  of  the  "Lake,"  not  the  "  Sea,"  of 
Gennesareth;  ■  but  all  the  Jews'  country  is 
often  loosely  called  "Judaea"  by  him2  in  a 
way  that  betrays  a  foreigner's  hand,  while 
some  of  his  statements  in  Luke  iii.  i   and 

1  Contrast  Luke  viii.  23  £f.  with  Mark  v.  1. 
8  Luke  i.  5;  iv.  44;  vii.  17. 

16 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

Acts  v.  36,  37,  seem  to  rest  upon  a  careless 
use  of  Josephus.  It  is  therefore  unjustifiable 
to  press  Luke's  proved  accuracy  with  re- 
gard to  the  conditions  of  society  in  Asia 
Minor  as  an  argument  for  the  accuracy  of 
his  knowledge  of  Palestine. 

The  apocryphal  Gospels  shew  less  know- 
ledge of  Palestine  than  the  canonical  Four. 
This  is  the  case  even  with  the  fragment  dis- 
covered at  Oxyrhynchus  in  1905,  which  at 
first  was  supposed  to  exhibit  a  real  ac- 
quaintance with  Jerusalemite  ritual  and 
topography.  Further  investigation,  how- 
ever, seems  to  shew  that  the  writer's  ideas 
of  the  topography  of  Jerusalem  were  derived 
from  the  Old  Testament  in  Greek,  and  that 
his  ideas  of  Temple  ritual  imply  familiarity 
with  Egyptian  rather  than  with  Jewish  cus- 
toms.1 If  that  be  the  case,  the  sayings  as- 
cribed in  the  fragment  to  Jesus  are  more 

1  See  H.  B.  Swete,  Zwei  neue  Evangelienfragmente,  in 
Lietzmann's  Kleine  Texte. 

17 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

likely  to  represent  the  ideas  of  some  Egyp- 
tian Christians  of  the  second  or  third  cen- 
tury, than  to  be  based  upon  what  Jesus 
really  said  in  Palestine  in  the  first  century. 
2.  yewish  Language.  —  In  some  of  our 
documents,  and  notably  in  the  Gospel  ac- 
cording to  Mark,  we  actually  find  words 
and  sentences  written  down  in  Jewish  Ara- 
maic, the  vernacular  of  Palestine.  Words 
like  Abba  (i.e.  "  My  Father  ") ,  and  the 
cry  "Eli,  Eli,  lama  sabachthani,"  on  the 
Cross,  could  not  have  been  invented  by 
Greek-speaking  persons.  They  must  have 
come  down  to  us  direct  and  unchanged 
from  the  living  memory  of  the  first  Pales- 
tinian disciples.  The  solemn  "Amen"  at 
the  beginning  of  our  Lord's  sayings,  un- 
fortunately translated  in  English  and  turned 
into  "  Verily,"  is  another  instance  of  direct 
reminiscence  of  his  manner  of  speech.  For 
the  most  part  these  Semitic  phrases  tend 
to  be  left  out  in  the  later  documents,  and 
18 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

in  one  case  a  non-canonical  document,  the 
Gospel  of  Peter,  has  actually  transmitted  a 
mistranslation  of  the  foreign  word.  But  the 
fact  that  such  words  occur  in  any  of  our 
documents,  and  that  they  have  not  been 
altogether  distorted  in  transmission,  is  a 
very  strong  indication  that  such  documents 
contain  a  historical  element  not  very  far 
removed  from  the  actual  events. 

Direct  transliterations  of  Semitic  words 
and  phrases  are,  after  all,  a  sort  of  historical 
luxury  beyond  what  one  has  a  right  to  de- 
mand. Almost  equally  conclusive,  if  not 
quite  so  dramatically  telling,  are  the  Aramaic 
idioms  scattered  over  the  Gospels,  espe- 
cially in  the  recorded  words  of  Jesus.  Take, 
for  instance,  the  use  of  the  word  homologtn, 
translated  "confess."  In  Matthew  vii.  23 
it  is  used  merely  of  a  solemn  asseveration; 
in  Matthew  x.  32,  and  in  some  other  places, 
it  is  used  most  curiously  with  the  preposi- 
tion "  in."  Jesus  says,  "  those  who  confess 

*9 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

in  me,  I  will  confess  in  them,"  meaning 
that  those  who  acknowledge  that  they  are 
his  disciples,  he  will  acknowledge  to  be 
his  disciples.  This  is  mere  Aramaic  idiom 
taken  over  into  Greek,  shewing  that  the 
saying  itself  must  have  been  originally  ut- 
tered in  Aramaic,  and  that  its  Greek  form 
is  an  almost  literal  translation  of  the  origi- 
nal.1 It  may  in  fact  be  said,  that,  if  we  are 
to  regard  any  alleged  saying  of  Jesus  as 
genuine  and  historical,  we  must  be  able  to 
put  back  its  essential  terms  from  the  trans- 
mitted Greek  into  the  original  Aramaic. 

Equally  searching  are  the  arguments  to 
be  derived  from  the  Old  Testament  quota- 
tions and  allusions  in  the  Gospel.  If  they 
depend  upon  the  renderings  of  the  Septua- 
gint,  they  are  suspect;  if  they  be  genuine, 
they  will  be  independent  of  the  Septuagint, 
and  will  imply  a  direct  use  of  the  Hebrew 

1  It  is  curious  that  the  idiom  does  not  appear  in  Greek 
with  the  verb  for  "  deny." 

20 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

original  or  of  the  Aramaic  Targum.  This  is 
so  important  a  point,  that  it  may  be  worth 
while  to  explain  it  more  fully.  The  Septua- 
gint  is  the  name  commonly  given  to  the 
ancient  translation  into  Greek  of  the  He- 
brew Pentateuch  and  other  Jewish  Scrip- 
tures, made  at  Alexandria  in  the  time  of  the 
Ptolemies.  This  version  had  become  the 
Bible  of  the  Greek-speaking  Jews  in  New 
Testament  times,  and  from  them  it  passed 
over  to  the  Christians.  In  essentials,  apart 
from  corruptions  of  text  and  certain  sub- 
stitutions in  the  less-read  books,  it  be- 
came the  Bible  of  the  Church,  and  it  is 
the  Bible  of  the  Greek  Church  still.  It  was 
therefore  through  the  Septuagint,  and 
through  the  Septuagint  alone,  that  the  Bible 
was  known  to  Christians  during  the  second 
century  and  the  latter  part  of  the  first  cen- 
tury, i.  e.  during  the  time  that  our  Gospels 
assumed  their  final  shape  and  became  ca- 
nonical. The  original  Hebrew  was  a  sealed 

21 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

book  to  them  after  the  Church  had  definitely 
separated  from  the  Synagogue,  i.  e.  ever 
since  the  great  catastrophe  of  70  a.  d.  A 
man  like  St.  Paul  could  use  the  Scriptures 
both  in  Hebrew  and  in  Greek.  He  had  had 
some  regular  Rabbinical  training,  and  he 
quotes  the  Bible  like  a  modern  English 
scholar  who  can  read  his  Greek  Testament 
and  who  gives  sometimes  the  renderings  of 
the  ordinary  English  version,  sometimes 
his  own  renderings  direct  from  the  original. 
But  our  Lord  and  his  first  disciples  spoke 
Aramaic;  there  is  nothing  to  suggest  that 
they  were  acquainted  with  the  current  Greek 
version.  In  the  Synagogues  they  would  hear 
the  Scriptures  read  in  the  original  Hebrew, 
followed  by  a  more  or  less  stereotyped 
rendering  into  the  Aramaic  of  Palestine, 
the  language  of  the  country,  itself  a  cousin 
of  Hebrew.  A  faithfully  reported  saying 
therefore  of  Jesus  or  of  Peter  ought  to 
agree  with  the  Hebrew  against  the  Greek, 
22 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

or  at  least  ought  not  to  acquire  its  point 
and  appropriateness  from  a  peculiar  ren- 
dering in  the  Greek. 

A  couple  of  examples  will  illustrate 
what  has  been  said.  The  Gospel  of  Mat- 
thew alone  records  the  circumstance  that 
Jesus  used  to  quote  the  word  of  the  Lord 
by  Hosea,  "  I  desire  mercy  and  not  sacri- 
fice." ■  It  is  a  point  in  favour  of  the  authen- 
ticity of  the  saying  that  it  agrees  with  the 
Hebrew  text  against  the  Greek  translation 
of  the  Prophets,  which  had  "  I  desire  mercy 
rather  than  sacrifice."  At  least,  it  shews 
us  that  the  tradition  about  this  saying  of 
Jesus  goes  back  to  a  Palestinian  source. 
We  may  take  as  a  contrast  the  story  told 
in  Matthew  xxi.  16,  and  there  only,  that 
when  the  boys  were  crying  out  "  Hosanna  " 
in  the  Temple,  and  the  Chief  Priests  were 
vexed,  Jesus  replied,  "  Have  ye  never  read, 
4  Out  of  the  mouth  of  babes  and  sucklings 

1  Hosea  vi.  6. 

23 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE   OF  JESUS 

thou  hast  perfected  <praiseV"  Here  the 
whole  point  of  the  saying  is  in  the  word 
'praise,'  but  it  is  a  word  that  does  not 
occur  in  the  original  Hebrew  at  all.  In  the 
Hebrew  of  Psalm  viii.  2  we  find,  "  Thou 
hast  ordained  strength  " ;  it  is  only  in  the 
not  very  accurate  Greek  translation  of  the 
Psalms  that  "  praise "  occurs.  The  story 
therefore  has  evidently  at  least  been  recast 
by  some  one  who  used  the  Old  Testament 
in  Greek,  and  we  must  consider  it  impro- 
bable that  Jesus  really  quoted  this  verse 
from  the  Psalms  in  the  circumstances  al- 
leged. 

Both  the  above  instances  are  taken  from 
the  Gospel  according  to  Matthew.  The 
compiler  of  that  Gospel  gives  the  quota- 
tions from  the  Old  Testament  which  he 
makes  in  his  own  person  sometimes  direct 
from  the  Hebrew,  sometimes  according  to 
the  current  Greek  translation.  Like  Paul 
of  Tarsus,  he  illustrates  in  himself  the 
24 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

transplantation  of  the  Christian  movement 
from  the  Semitic  soil  in  which  it  germin- 
ated into  the  Graeco-Roman  civilization. 
Luke,  on  the  other  hand,  always  uses  the 
Septuagint  in  his  own  quotations  and  allu- 
sions to  the  Old  Testament.  Whether  he 
was  able  to  understand  any  Semitic  lan- 
guage is  of  course  unknown  to  us;  but  his 
acquaintance  with  the  Bible  is  certainly 
derived  from  the  Greek.  We  cannot,  there- 
fore, believe  that  he  gives  us  the  actual 
words  used  by  Jesus  in  the  Synagogue  at 
Nazareth  ;  '  for  the  passages  there  quoted 
from  Isaiah  lxi.  i  ff.  and  lviii.  6  are  taken 
from  the  Septuagint.  But  the  quotation 
from  Isaiah  liii.  12,  at  the  end  of  the  say- 
ings given  in  Luke  xxii.  35-37,  sayings 
which  on  general  grounds  appear  to  have 
the  ring  of  genuineness,  does  not  agree  in 
diction  with  the  Septuagint  and  does  agree 
with   the    Hebrew.    Here,   therefore,   we 

1  Luke  iv.  18  ff. 
25 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

have  an  instance  of  faithful  reminiscence 
of  our  Lord's  words. 

•  3.  Jewish  Thought.  —  Properly  to  dis- 
cuss the  Jewish  thought  expressed  and  pre- 
supposed in  the  Gospels  would  be  to  write 
a  full  commentary  on  them.  For  our  im- 
mediate purpose  it  will  be  sufficient  to 
point  out  that  hardly  any  other  kind  of 
thought  is  presupposed.  There  is  no  doubt 
a  certain  amount  of  thought  and  philoso- 
phy which  is  ultimately  Greek,  whatever 
be  its  immediate  origin,  presupposed  in  the 
Fourth  Gospel.  In  the  Nativity  Stories, 
also,  some  critics  have  seen  Greek  notions 
underlying  the  narrative.  But  it  is  the  ob- 
vious fact  that  in  the  rest  of  the  Gospels 
the  Greek  influence,  so  far  as  the  thought 
and  mental  atmosphere  of  the  subject-mat- 
ter are  concerned,  is  simply  non-existent. 
Apart  from  questions  of  language  and 
purely  literary  criticism,  the  three  Synop- 
tic Gospels  might  be  translations  from  the 
26 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

Aramaic.  The  main  ideas  of  the  Synoptic 
Gospels,  the  fundamental  phrases  round 
which  move  the  thoughts  belonging  to  the 
Gospel,  all  have  their  explanation  and  illus- 
tration from  contemporary  Judaism.  The 
Kingdom  of  God,  the  Christ  or  Messiah, 
the  Day  of  Judgment,  treasure  in  heaven, 
Abraham's  bosom, — all  these  are  Jewish 
ideas,  entirely  foreign  to  the  native  thought 
of  the  Graeco-Roman  world.  We  hear  no- 
thing in  the  Gospels  about  the  Immortality 
of  the  Soul,  much  about  the  Resurrection 
at  the  last  day;  nothing  about  "Virtue," 
much  about  "Righteousness,"  little  about 
Purification,  much  about  the  Forgiveness 
of  Sin.  Even  the  polemic  against  heathen- 
ism is  absent. 

To  such  an  extent  are  the  Synoptic  Gos- 
pels Jewish  books,  occupied  with  problems 
belonging  originally  to  first-century  Juda- 
ism, that  it  makes  large  parts  of  them  diffi- 
cult to  use  as  books  of  universal  religion. 

27 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

But  it  is  just  this  Jewish  character  that 
gives  them  their  value  as  historical  docu- 
ments. "Lo!  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  in 
your  midst! "  said  Jesus  once.  The  Oxy- 
rhynchus  "  Sayings  of  Jesus,"  representing 
a  development  of  Christianity  among  the 
Greek-speaking  townsfolk  of  Egypt,  com- 
bines this  phrase  with  the  old  Greek  Del- 
phic precept  "Know  thyself!  "  If  the  say- 
ing had  been  transmitted  to  us  only  in  this 
connexion,  we  might  well  hesitate  to  re- 
ceive it  as  a  genuine  utterance  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth.  But  the  canonical  Gospel 
of  Luke  joins  it  with  the  announcement  of 
the  unexpected  advent  of  the  Kingdom  of 
God,  which  would  come  before  those  who 
were  unprepared  were  aware.  This  has  a 
claim,  an  excellent  claim,  to  be  accepted 
as  a  historical  representation  of  the  teach- 
ing of  Jesus;  the  occurrence  in  such  aeon- 
text  of  the  saying  about  the  Kingdom  of 
God  appearing  in  the  midst  is  a  strong  rea- 
28 


PRELIMINARY  CONSIDERATIONS 

son  for  regarding  it  as  genuine  and  tells  us 
its  historical  interpretation.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  Oxyrhynchus  document  gives  us 
only  an  application  of  our  Lord's  words  to 
changed  conditions  of  time  and  place. 


II 

THE    SYNOPTIC    PROBLEM 

When  we  study  the  Gospels  together,  it 
is  at  once  obvious  that  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
the  Gospel  according  to  John,  stands  apart 
from  the  others.  For  the  most  part  the  nar- 
ratives and  discourses  which  it  contains  are 
not  found  in  the  other  three  Gospels,  while 
the  matter  contained  in  these  is  not  found 
in  the  fourth.  But  the  three  Gospels  of  Mat- 
thew, Mark,  and  Luke  have  much  in  com- 
mon. It  is  possible  to  arrange  them  in  par- 
allel columns,  so  that  their  common  matter 
may  be  studied  and  compared  at  a  glance. 
This  was  first  done  in  a  systematic  way 
about  a  hundred  years  ago  by  J.  J.  Gries- 
bach,  who  called  this  arrangement  in  paral- 
lel columns  a  Synopsis.  From  the  time  of 
Griesbach  the  Gospels  of  Matthew,  Mark, 
30 


THE   SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

and  Luke  have  been  called  the  Synoptic 
Gospels,  and  the  problem  of  the  relation  of 
Matthew,  Mark,  and  Luke  to  one  another 
is  the  Synoptic  Problem. 

A  century  of  investigation  has  brought 
the  Gospel  according  to  Mark  into  a  gen- 
erally acknowledged  position  of  priority  as 
a  historical  source.  This  has  been  effected 
almost  LMitirely  by  internal  considerations, 
by  examining  the  common  matter  of  Mat- 
thew, Mark,  and  Luke,  comparing  the  par- 
allel narratives  as  wholes  and  in  detail,  and 
by  estimating  the  nature  and  significance 
of  the  peculiar  characteristics  of  each  of 
the  three.  External  evidence,  the  testimony 
of  ancient  writers,  is  so  scanty  and  obscure 
that  little  of  direct  value  can  be  extracted 
from  it.  By  about  180  a.  d.  we  find  our 
four  Gospels  already  received  in  the 
church  as  a  sacred  and  exclusive  collec- 
tion. This  collection  seems  to  have  been 
already  formed  by  the  middle  of  the  sec- 

31 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

ond  century.  Before  that  the  several  Gos- 
pels must  have  circulated  independently. 
The  Third  Gospel,  in  fact,  was  designed  by 
the  writer  of  it  to  be  the  first  volume  of  a 
longer  historical  work,  of  which  our  Acts  of 
the  Apostles  forms  the  second.  The  Second 
Gospel  is  mutilated  at  the  end;  its  text,  ac- 
cording to  the  oldest  manuscripts  in  Greek 
and  the  oldest  Syriac  version,  ends  at  xvi.  8, 
in  the  middle  of  a  sentence.  This  mutila- 
tion must  have  been  accidental,  for  any 
intentional  curtailment  would  have  been 
made  at  a  more  suitable  point:  even  xvi.  7 
would  have  made  a  better  finish.  There- 
fore we  may  go  on  to  infer  that  all  our 
copies  of  the  Gospel  according  to  Mark 
are  descended  from  a  single  copy,  imper- 
fect at  the  end  and  perhaps  tattered  else- 
where. As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  are  one  or 
two  places  in  Mark,  e.  g.  incomprehensible 
proper  names  like  Boanerges  and  Dal- 
manutha^  where  the  transmitted  text  can 
32 


THE   SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

best  be  explained  as  the  result  of  imperfect 
attempts  to  copy  an  illegible  exemplar.  But 
such  places  are  few.  On  the  whole,  the  text 
is  satisfactory  in  essentials  ;  apart  from  the 
minor  stylistic  and  harmonistic  changes  of 
scribes,  we  seem  to  have  the  work  very 
much  as  it  left  the  author's  hand. 

"  Mark  was  known  to  the  two  other  syn- 
optic writers,  when  it  was  already  in  the 
same  condition  as  we  now  have  it,  both  in 
text  and  contents."  So  writes  Wellhausen.1 
This  is  the  result  of  the  critical  study  of 
the  Synoptic  Gospels  during  the  nineteenth 
century.  Now  that  this  result  has  been 
attained,  it  is  easy  to  verify  in  its  main  out- 
lines by  any  one  who  will  compare  for 
himself  the  common  matter  of  Matthew, 
Mark,  and  Luke.  It  is  possible  to  explain 
all,  or  almost  all,  the  features  of  the  Gos- 
pel narrative  as  we  read  it  in  Matthew  and 
Luke  on  the  supposition  that  it  is  based 

1  Einleitung  in  die  drei  ersten  Evangelien^  §  6,  p.  57. 

33 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

upon  Mark,  impossible  to  explain  Mark  on 
the  supposition  that  it  is  based  on  a  docu- 
ment similar  to  Matthew  or  Luke.  The 
common  order  of  the  anecdotes  is  Mark's 
order;  where  Matthew  deserts  Mark's  or- 
der, Mark  is  supported  by  Luke,  where 
Luke  deserts  Mark's  order,  Mark  is  sup- 
ported by  Matthew.  Matthew  and  Luke 
never  agree  in  order  against  Mark.  It  is 
practically  the  same  with  the  text  itself  as 
with  the  order  of  the  narratives :  Mark  and 
Luke  agree  against  Matthew,  Matthew 
and  Mark  agree  against  Luke,  while  the 
points  in  which  Matthew  and  Luke  agree 
against  Mark  are  so  few  and  so  insignifi- 
cant in  character  that  it  seems  unnecessary 
to  postulate  the  existence  of  an  earlier  form 
of  Mark  —  what  used  to  be  called  in  Ger- 
many Ur-Marcus,  i.  e.  original  Mark  —  in 
order  to  account  for  them.1 

1  See  the  discussion  in  the  present  writer's  Gospel  His- 
tory and  its  Transmission,  pp.  42-58,  and  also  Sir  John 
Hawkins*  Horae  Synopticae,  172  £f.  (2d  ed.,  208  ff.). 

34 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

But  the  demonstration  of  the  relative  pri- 
ority of  the  Gospel  according  to  Mark  is 
only  the  first  step  in  the  criticism  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels.  Mark  may  be  older  than 
Matthew  or  Luke,  and  may  constitute  one 
of  the  sources  from  which  they  were  com- 
piled. We  must  go  on  to  consider  the  Gos- 
pel of  Mark  in  itself  as  a  historical  docu- 
ment, and  also  to  investigate  the  source 
and  character  of  those  large  portions  of 
Matthew  and  Luke  that  have  no  parallel  in 
Mark,  or  at  least  cannot  have  been  taken 
directly  from  Mark.  We  may  admit  that 
Matthew  and  Luke  used  Mark  practically 
in  the  form  which  still  survives,  but  was 
that  the  original  form?  Is  the  Gospel  of 
Mark  itself  perhaps  based  on  an  earlier 
document?  And  can  we  trace  in  Matthew 
and  Luke  the  use  of  any  other  document 
besides  Mark? 

It  will  be  convenient  to  say  a  few  words 
about  the  last  question  at  this  point.  The 

35 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Luke  mainly  differ 
from  that  of  Mark  in  that  they  contain  a 
large  number  of  sayings  of  Jesus  not  given 
by  Mark.  Many  of  these  sayings  are  pecu- 
liar to  Matthew  or  peculiar  to  Luke,  but 
others  are  given  in  both,  and  often  with 
such  coincidences  of  language  and  of  order 
that  they  must  have  been  derived  from  a 
common  source.  Thus,  for  instance,  Mat- 
thew v.-vii.  (the  so-called  "  Sermon  on  the 
Mount ")  is  parallel  to  Luke  vi.  20-49,  anc^ 
Matthew  xi.  2-19  is  practically  repeated  in 
Luke  vii.  18-35.  A  comparison  of  these 
passages  leads  us  to  infer  that  Matthew  and 
Luke  have  made  use  of  a  common  source, 
written  in  Greek,  which  must  have  con- 
tained, amongst  other  things,  sayings  of 
Jesus  about  John  the  Baptist,  together  with 
a  collection  of  ethical  sayings  which  began 
with  the  Beatitudes  and  ended  with  the 
similitude  of  the  houses  built  on  the  rock 
or  on  the  river-bed.  The  common  source, 

36 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

now  lost,  except  so  far  as  it  is  preserved  in 
Matthew  and  Luke,  it  was  formerly  the 
fashion  to  call  the  "  Logia,"  from  a  belief 
that  it  was  mentioned  under  that  name  by 
Papias  of  Hierapolis  in  Asia  Minor  about 
the  mi4dle  of  the  second  century.1  Well- 
hausen  and  others,  however,  call  it  "  Q^," 
i.  e.  Quelle  (source),  and  this  name  is  pre- 
ferable, as  we  know  so  little  of  its  origin  or 
extent. 

The  common  matter  of  Matthew  and 
Luke,  not  shared  by  Mark,  almost  all  con- 
sists of  sayings  of  Jesus.  We  therefore  as- 
sume that  Q^  mainly  consisted  of  sayings. 
But  the  same  arguments  that  prove  Q^ 
to    have    contained  the   "Sermon    on    the 

1  Papias  (quoted  by  Eusebius,  Ch.  History,  Hi.  39)  says  : 
41  Matthew  indeed  in  the  Hebrew  language  wrote  down  the 
Logia,  and  each  interpreted  them  as  he  was  able."  What 
the  work  was  to  which  Papias  alludes  is  very  doubtful :  it 
is  certain  that  our  Gospel  according  to  Matthew  is  a  Greek 
work,  based  upon  Greek  sources,  one  of  them  being  in  fact 
our  Gospel  according  to  Mark. 

37 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Mount,"  or  at  least  an  earlier  form  of  that 
collection  of  sayings,  also  prove  Q^  to  have 
contained  the  story  of  the  healing  of  the 
centurion's  boy.  It  is  because  Matthew 
(v.  3-vii.  27)  and  Luke  (vi.  20-49)  each 
contains  a  collection  of  sayings,  beginning 
with  beatitudes  and  ending  with  the  simili- 
tude of  the  House  on  the  Rock,  that  we 
infer  a  similar  collection  to  have  existed  in 
Q^.  But  this  collection  is  followed,  both  in 
Matthew  (viii.  3-13)  and  in  Luke  (vii. 
1-10),  by  the  story  of  the  centurion.  If  our 
first  inference  be  valid,  then  the  story  of 
the  centurion  must  also  be  assigned  to  Q^. 
Q^  therefore  was  not  a  mere  assembly  of 
sayings  of  Jesus,  but  also  contained  anec- 
dotes about  his  wonderful  works. 

But  when  we  have  said  this,  we  have 
said  nearly  everything  that  is  absolutely 
certain.  Professor  Harnack  in  his  book, 
"  Sayings  and  Discourses  of  Jesus,"  ■  has 

1  Harnack,  Sprilcke  und  Reden  Jesu,  1907. 

38     - 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

attempted  to  reconstruct  Q^  from  the  sec- 
tions of  Matthew  and  Luke  which  he  con- 
siders to  have  been  derived  from  this  lost 
document.  But  it  is  very  doubtful  whether 
his  reconstruction  can  be  accepted  as  any- 
thing more  than  a  mass  of  genuine  but  de- 
tached fragments,  and  what  we  want  is  a 
picture  of  Q^  as  a  whole.  We  may  agree 
that  the  sayings  and  discourses  which 
Harnack  assigns  to  Q^  really  did  form  part 
of  it,  but  we  have  very  little  reason  to  think 
that  Q^  did  not  contain  a  great  deal  more. 

One  thing  at  least  is  clear.  We  can  see 
by  a  comparison  of  Matthew  and  Luke 
with  Mark  that  Matthew  and  Luke  have 
used  Mark,  making  it  in  fact  the  basis 
upon  which  their  own  Gospels  have  been 
planned.  Between  them  they  have  managed 
to  incorporate  almost  all  the  Gospel  of 
Mark,  and  by  comparing  their  works  with 
the  original,  we  can  see  pretty  well  the  rea- 
sons which  led  them  to  drop  or  to  modify 

39 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

those  portions  of  Mark  which  they  have 
severally  dropped  or  modified.  But  we  are 
able  to  see  all  this,  because  the  Gospel  of 
Mark  is  actually  before  us.  If  the  Gospel 
of  Mark  were  unknown  to  us,  if  its  con- 
tents had  to  be  inferred  from  Matthew  and 
Luke,  should  we  be  able  to  reconstruct  it 
at  all  ?  I  do  not  think  so.  Even  if  by  divi- 
nation, rather  than  by  legitimate  criticism, 
we  recognised  as  Marcan  those  sections 
which  are  retained  only  by  Matthew  or 
only  by  Luke,  we  should  still  miss  all  the 
vivid  peculiarities  of  Mark.  And  when  we 
are  trying  to  estimate  the  tendencies  and 
characteristics  of  the  Gospel  of  Mark,  it  is 
just  by  the  peculiarities  of  the  work  that 
its  characteristics  are  revealed.  If  we  were 
reconstructing  Mark  by  the  same  process 
and  with  the  same  materials  that  we  use 
for  reconstructing  Q^,  that  is  to  say,  by  pick- 
ing out  the  Marcan  elements  from  Mat- 
thew and  Luke,  we  should  not  arrive  at  a 
40 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

document  in  which  our  Lord  says,  "The 
Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  and  not  man 
for  the  Sabbath,"  or  one  that  tells  us  how 
his  friends  once  thought  he  was  mad,  for 
these  things  are  preserved  neither  by  Mat- 
thew nor  by  Luke.  We  should  not  have 
any  idea  that  the  real  Mark  contained  the 
parable  of  the  ear  of  corn  growing  of  it- 
self. We  should  not  know  that  it  contained 
the  Aramaic  sayings,  Tali t ha  cumi,  and 
Ephphatha,  sayings  which  carry  us  back 
to  the  soil  of  Palestine.  We  could  not  have 
reconstructed  out  of  Matthew  and  Luke 
the  important  historical  notice  that  Jesus 
when  he  for  the  last  time  passed  through 
Galilee  "would  not  that  any  man  should 
know  it,"  or  that  he  began  his  answer  about 
the  great  commandment  with  the  "  Hear, 
O  Israel !  "  All  these  things  are  features 
really  characteristic  of  Mark;  it  is  the  pre- 
sence of  strongly  individual  features  such 
as  these  in  the  Gospel  of  Mark  that  gives  it 
41 


SOURCES  FOR  THE   LIFE  OF  JESUS 

its  preeminence  as  a  historical  document. 
But  not  one  of  them  would  be  found  in  a 
Mark  reconstructed  out  of  Matthew  and 
Luke,  and  I  cannot  believe  that  our  recon- 
structions of  Q^are  any  more  like  the  real 
Q^than  our  reconstructions  of  Mark  would 
be  like  the  real  Mark.1 

Another  point  also  has  to  be  taken  into 
consideration.  If  the  Gospel  of  Mark  were 
not  extant,  and  we  had  to  infer  its  scope 
and  contents  from  the  Gospels  of  Matthew 
and  Luke  alone,  is  it  not  almost  inevitable 
that  we  should  have  assigned  to  Mark  some 
things  that  we  now  know  to  belong  not  to 
Mark  but  to  Q^  ?  We  do  not  know  for  cer- 
tain that  Matthew  and  Luke  used  only  one 
common  source  besides  Mark,  and  it  re- 
mains possible  that  the  mass  of  material 
which  we  regard  as  belonging  to  Q^may 

1  See  Harnack's  Spruche  und  Reden  Jesu  (1907),  and  the 
present  writer's  review  of  it  in  the  Journal  of  Theological 
Studies,  viii.  454-459. 

42 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

have  been  drawn  from  at  least  two  separate 
sources.  It  is  conceivable,  for  instance, 
that  the  sayings  of  Jesus  which  relate  to 
John  the  Baptist,  together  with  the  account 
of  the  Baptist's  preaching,  may  have  been 
derived  from  a  document  different  from  that 
which  supplied  the  outline  of  the  "  Sermon 
on  the  Mount "  and  the  Parables.  I  do  not 
think  it  on  the  whole  probable,  but  there  is 
something  to  be  said  for  it,  and  it  is  a  pos- 
sibility to  be  borne  in  mind. 

What,  then,  it  may  be  asked,  do  we  gain 
by  the  recognition  of  this  lost  source  Q^,  if 
we  cannot  reconstruct  it?  The  answer,  I 
believe,  is  this:  that  by  recognising  certain 
sayings  in  Matthew  and  Luke  to  have  been 
drawn  from  the  same  source,  we  are  better 
able  to  isolate  the  features  in  the  sayings 
that  are  due  to  the  several  Evangelists,  and 
thereby  better  able  to  understand  what  they 
meant  in  their  original  form.  We  cannot 
do  without  either  the  Lucan  or  the  Mat- 

43 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

thaean  form  of  the  sayings,  but  we  can  use 
the  one  to  control  the  other. 

In  any  case,  the  material  comprehended 
under  the  sign  (^includes  very  many  of  the 
most  precious  jewels  of  the  Gospel.  When 
Justin  Martyr  in  the  second  century  wished 
to  exhibit  to  the  heathen  Emperor  the 
characteristic  ethical  teaching  of  Christ, 
nine  tenths  of  his  examples  came  out  of 
passages  derived  from  Q^.1  It  is  from  Q^ 
that  we  have  the  blessing  on  the  poor,  the 
hungry,  the  reviled;  from  Q^  come  "  Love 
your  enemies,"  "Turn  the  other  cheek," 
"Be  like  your  Father  who  maketh  His  sun 
to  shine  on  the  evil  and  the  good,"  "  Con- 
sider the  lilies,"  "Be  not  anxious  —  your 
Father  knoweth  ye  have  need,"  "  They 
shall  come  from  east  and  west  and  sit  down 
with  Abraham  in  the  kingdom  of  God."  It 
is  Q^  that  tells  us  that  the  adversaries  of 
Jesus  found  him  not  ascetic  enough  and 

*  Justin  Martyr,  Apology,  i.  15  f. 

44 


THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM 

mocked  at  him  as  a  friend  of  tax-gatherers 
and  sinners.  It  is  Q^  that  tells  us  that  Jesus 
said  "I  thank  thee,  Father,  that  thou  hast 
hidden  these  things  from  the  wise  and  re- 
vealed them  to  babes, —  even  so,  Father, 
for  so  it  was  pleasing  in  thy  sight."  If  the 
work  of  Mark  be  more  important  to  the 
historian,  it  is  Q^that  supplies  starting-points 
for  the  Christian  moralist.  Most  important 
of  all,  it  gives  light  and  shade  to  the  some- 
what austere  lines  of  the  portrait  of  Jesus 
sketched  in  the  Gospel  of  Mark. 

The  interest  of  Q^  is  extremely  great.  It 
is  great  from  what  we  actually  know  of  it, 
and  it  possesses  the  fascination  of  the  elu- 
sive and  the  unknown.  It  is  well  therefore 
to  keep  steadily  in  mind  how  little  we  can 
be  certain  even  of  the  general  plan  of  the 
work,  or  of  what  it  did  not  contain.  True  it  is 
that,  as  Justin  says,  "short  and  concise  came 
words  from  Christ,  for  he  was  no  sophist, 
but  his  word  was  a  mighty  work  of  God  " : 
45 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

detached  as  the  fragments  of  Q^must  remain 
to  us,  often  devoid  of  context  or  presuppos- 
ing totally  different  social  conditions  from 
those  of  our  own  age,  yet  the  single  sayings 
have  again  and  again  proved  themselves 
instinct  with  truly  divine  power.  Yet 
though  they  are  jewels,  they  are  for  the 
most  part  jewels  detached  from  their  origi- 
nal setting,  and  this  setting  we  cannot  re- 
construct as  a  whole.  I  am  persuaded  that 
Q^  is  to  us,  and  must  remain,  a  collection 
of  disconnected  fragments. 


Ill 

THE    GOSPEL   ACCORDING   TO    MARK 

The  question  most  in  debate  at  present 
in  the  criticism  of  the  Gospel  history  is 
whether  the  Gospel  according  to  Mark 
gives  us  a  generally  faithful  representation 
of  the  ministry  of  Jesus.  On  grounds 
mainly  of  literary  criticism  it  is  acknow- 
ledged that  our  Mark  was  used  as  a  basis  by 
the  other  synoptists.  The  Gospel  of  Mark 
is  therefore  more  primitive  as  a  whole 
than  the  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Luke  as 
wholes.  But  is  Mark  to  be  regarded  as  ab- 
solutely primitive?  And  even  if  we  regard 
the  analysis  of  Mark  into  its  component 
factors  as  for  us  an  insoluble  problem,  even 
if  we  regard  all  theories  of  an  Ur-Marcus 
as  baseless  guesses,  still  there  remains  the 
inevitable  question  of  the  value  of  our  Gos- 

47 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

pel  of  Mark  as  a  historical  source.  At  best 
it  is  a  mere  sketch  of  the  career  of  Jesus 
Christ:  but  is  it,  we  must  ask,  a  trustworthy 
sketch  ? 

The  answer  given  by  modern  investiga- 
tors to  this  most  important  question  de- 
pends in  the  last  resort  upon  the  view  that 
each  one  forms  of  the  real  work  undertaken 
and  accomplished  by  Jesus  of  Nazareth. 
Undoubtedly  there  are  many,  coming  from 
very  different  philosophical  and  theological 
camps,  to  whom  the  Gospel  according  to 
Mark  appears  to  be  an  inadequate  interpre- 
tation of  our  Lord.  It  does  not  satisfy  the 
modern  philosophical  liberal,  who  would 
like  to  regard  the  mission  of  Jesus  as 
"  purely  religio-ethical  and  humanitarian."1 
The  philosophical  liberal  finds  fewer  moral 
maxims  in  Mark  than  in  Matthew  and 
Luke,  while  at  the  same  time  he  is  shocked 
by  the  description  of  a  number  of  miracles, 

1  B.  W.  Bacon,  Beginnings  of  Gospel  Story,  p.  xxxviii. 

48 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

—  mostly,  it  is  true,  of  healing, —  the  details 
of  which  he  feels  himself  obliged  to  explain 
away.  But  the  picture  drawn  in  Mark  is 
hardly  more  satisfactory  from  the  orthodox 
conservative  point  of  view.  In  Wellhau- 
sen's  phrase,  "  we  hear  of  Disciples  and 
we  wonder  how  He  comes  to  have  them." ■ 
Till  our  eyes  become  accustomed  to  the 
atmosphere  it  is  difficult  to  recognize  the 
conventional  Saviour,  with  the  gentle  unin- 
dividualizcd  face,  in  the  stormy  and  mys- 
terious Personage  portrayed  by  the  sec- 
ond Gospel.  "  And  they  were  in  the  way, 
going  up  to  Jerusalem,  and  Jesus  was  going 
before  them,  and  they  were  amazed,  and 
some  as  they  followed  were  afraid  " a  —  as 
we  read  the  story  in  Mark  we  follow  Jesus 
on  his  way,  and  we  hardly  know  why  or 
whither.  At  least,  we  hardly  know  what 
is  being  told  us,  if  we  listen  with  mod- 
ern presuppositions,  instead  of  coming  with 

1  Einleitung,  p.  51.  a  Mark  x.  32. 

49 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

our  minds  full  of  the  Jewish  expectations  of 
the  Kingdom  of  God,  as  they  took  shape 
during  the  turbulent  two  centuries  that 
preceded  the  crucifixion  of  Jesus. 

The  ultimate  difficulty  felt  by  so  many 
modern  critics  about  the  Gospel  of  Mark 
is  not  the  minor  discrepancies  in  the  narra- 
tive, though  they  are  present,  or  the  tales 
of  miracle,  for  it  is  always  possible  to  allow 
for  unscientific  description  or  exaggeration. 
The  difficulty  lies  in  its  presentation  of  the 
actual  contents  of  the  "  Gospel "  itself  and 
of  the  career  of  Jesus.  According  to  these 
critics,  Mark  has  not  only  put  in  features 
of  the  Ministry  that  he  might  have  left  out, 
he  has  left  out  things,  and  those  the  most 
important,  that  he  ought  to  have  put  in. 
Where,  they  say,  is  the  Teaching  of  Jesus  ? 
Mark  gives  us  neither  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount  nor  the  Parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son. 
One  who  considers  that  Mark  used  (^con- 
fesses that  the  use  made  of  it  is  "  by  no 
So 


THE  GOSPEL   ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

means  characterized  by  sympathetic  and 
appreciative  insight." l  And  if,  as  tradition 
seems  to  assert,  the  ultimate  source  of  the 
Evangelist's  information  be  St.  Peter  him- 
self, is  it  possible  to  suppose  that  the  real 
characteristics  of  our  Lord's  career  could 
have  been  thrown  so  completely  out  of 
focus  ? 

It  may  readily  be  granted  that  most  of 
these  objections  are  weighty,  if  only  we  can 
be  sure  of  the  foundation  upon  which  they 
rest.  But  it  is  the  foundation  itself  that  is 
insecure.  The  objections  all  assume  that 
Jesus  was  really  and  primarily  an  ethical 
teacher,  or  a  social  reformer,  or  both. 
Now,  if  we  regard  Jesus  from  this  point  of 
view,  it  is  true  that  many  features  in  the 
Gospel  of  Mark  can  hardly  be  treated  as 
historically  accurate.  The  very  ground  plan 

1  Bacon,  Beginnings,  p.  xx.  That  such  a  judgment  has 
to  be  passed  upon  Mark's  use  of  Q^is  an  argument  for  dis- 
believing that  Mark  knew  Q^at  all. 

51 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

of  the  work  becomes  incredible.  It  becomes 
impossible  to  comprehend  or  to  justify  the 
journey  of  Jesus  to  Jerusalem,  or  to  obtain 
an  intelligible  picture  of  his  doings  and 
sayings  when  he  arrived  there.  Both  from 
the  liberals  and  from  the  conservatives  we 
hear  that  the  Paschal  week  is  too  short  a 
period  for  "  the  Jerusalem  ministry."  If  the 
object  of  Jesus  in  going  to  Jerusalem  was 
to  teach  there,  then  the  time  allowed  by 
Mark  is  insufficient.  If  his  object  were  "  a 
program  of  peaceful  reform  in  the  interest 
of  the  masses," f  we  can  only  say  that  it 
was  eminently  unsuccessful.  And  if  his 
object  in  going  to  Jerusalem  was,  as  Mark 
seems  to  tell  us,  simply  to  be  killed,  is  not 
that  irrational,  the  act  of  a  fanatic  ?  Was 
it  worthy  of  the  founder  of  the  religion  of 
the  civilized  world  ? 

It  is  perhaps  not  out  of  place  to  remind 
ourselves  that  this  is  not  the  first  time  the 

1  Bacon,  Beginnings,  p.  158. 

52 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

Way  of  the  Cross  has  been  accounted  fool- 
ishness both  by  philosophers  and  by  tradi- 
tionalists ;  for  the  doctrine  set  forth  by 
Mark  is  the  Doctrine  of  the  Cross.  To  such 
an  extent  is  this  the  case  that  the  Evangel- 
ist is  commonly  supposed  in  critical  theories 
to  have  derived  his  conception  of  Christ's 
work  from  St.  Paul.  To  quote  Professor 
Bacon  once  more  :  "  The  Paulinism  of 
Mark  is  supremely  manifest  in  this  evan- 
gelist's whole  conception  of  what  consti- 
tutes the  apostolic  message "  ;  it  is  "  the 
continual  reiteration  of  the  doctrine,  '  He 
that  would  save  his  life  shall  lose  it.'  "  ■  Of 
course  this  is  Paulinism ;  but  what  if  Paul- 
inism in  this  respect  was  really  "the  mind 
of  Christ"  ? 

Once  more  it  may  be  well  to  point  out 
the  very  peculiar  position  occupied  by  the 
Gospel  of  Mark  in  the  history  of  early 
Christian  literature,  for  it  is  this  peculiar 

1  Beginnings,  pp.  xxvii,  xxviii. 

53 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

position  that  compels  us  to  weigh  with  the 
utmost  care  and  deference  the  story  that 
it  offers  to  us.  On  the  one  hand  there  is 
nothing  in  Christian  literature  to  indicate 
that  the  Gospel  of  Mark  was  ever  popular 
or  official,  or  that  it  was  written  to  suit  the 
taste  of  any  community  that  has  left  any 
trace  in  history.  Irenaeus  says  somewhere 
that  Mark  was  used  by  the  Docetic  heretics; 
but  he  brings  forward  no  evidence  in  sup- 
port of  his  statement,  which  seems  a  mere 
theory  made  to  correspond  with  the  use 
of  Luke  by  the  Marcionites  and  of  Matthew 
by  the  Ebionites.  If  existing  evidence  be 
any  reflex  of  actual  use,  the  Gospel  of  Mark 
was,  and  has  been  till  the  present  day,  un- 
popular and  neglected.  It  is,  in  fact,  more 
or  less  of  a  puzzle  how  it  came  to  be  in- 
cluded in  the  Church's  Canon.  It  is  written 
in  an  uncultivated  style,  and  it  occupies 
itself  with  those  parts  and  aspects  of  the 
Gospel    story   concerning   which    Greek- 

54 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

speaking  Christians  seem  to  have  taken 
very  little  interest,  until  the  rise  of  the  cult 
of  the  Holy  Places  in  Palestine  toward 
the  very  end  of  the  second  century  a.  d. 
I  find  it  difficult  to  believe  that  a  book  of 
this  kind  is  the  work  of  an  eclectic,  who 
combined  Pauline  doctrine  with  Petrine 
traditions  and  wove  them  together  into  a 
strange  and  rough,  yet  vigorous  tale.  More- 
over —  and  this  is  the  discovery  of  modern 
literary  criticism  —  this  unpopular  Gospel 
was  indeed  used  by  one  class  of  persons, 
viz.  those  who  after  Mark  attempted  to  tell 
the  story  of  Jesus  Christ.  St.  Luke  informs 
us  in  his  preface  that  "  many,"  before  he 
himself  wrote,  had  taken  in  hand  to  draw  up 
some  account  of  Christian  origins;  but  how- 
ever many  there  may  have  been,  he  uses 
the  Gospel  of  Mark  for  one  of  the  main 
sources  of  his  own  work.  The  Gospel  ac- 
cording to  Matthew  to  a  still  greater  degree 
is  based  upon  Mark.  It  seems  almost  as  if 

55 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

these  writers  had  been  compelled  to  use  a 
writing  which  no  one  else  cared  to  quote. 

Surely  the  natural  inference  to  be  drawn 
is  that  the  point  of  view  from  which  Mark 
had  written  was  already  antiquated  when 
the  later  synoptic  Evangelists  made  their 
compilations.  The  Gospel  of  Mark  may 
perhaps  be  the  work  of  a  less  cultivated 
mind  than  that  of  the  other  Gospel  writers; 
at  any  rate  it  comes  before  us  as  a  docu- 
ment belonging  to  an  earlier  stage  in  the 
development  of  Christian  ideas  than  the 
other  Gospels.  If  then  we  find  it  animated 
by  ideas  which  do  occur  in  Paul,  though 
during  the  second  century  they  find  hardly 
any  echo  in  orthodox  Christian  literature, 
some  part  of  the  resemblance  may  be  due 
to  its  primitive  age  and  character.  In  any 
case,  it  is  our  plain  duty  to  weigh  well 
the  story  told  in  this  venerable  document, 
before  we  reject  it  in  favour  of  modern 
reconstructions    of  the    course  of   events. 

56 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

Naturally  we  need  not  expect  any  im- 
possible standard  of  accuracy  or  insight. 
The  question  at  issue  is  not  of  the  presen- 
tation of  details,  but  of  the  general  view. 
It  is  not  claimed  that  the  second  Evangel- 
ist was  by  nature  or  by  training  a  specially 
gifted  historian,  but  he  was  too  much  in 
touch  with  the  events  to  give  a  wholly 
distorted  account  of  them.  The  writer  of 
the  Fourth  Gospel  may  perhaps  have  a 
claim  to  be  heard  as  an  interpreter  of  Jesus 
Christ:  the  office  of  Mark  is  rather  to  be 
a  witness  of  what  men  saw  and  heard. 

The  Kingdom  of  God  and  the  "  Son 
of  Man r 

What,  then,  is  the  general  conception  of 
the  mission  of  Jesus  set  before  us  in  the 
Gospel  of  Mark  ?  We  may  begin  with  two 
or  three  quotations  from  Professor  Bacon, 
who  is  all  the  better  witness  as  he  is  a  con- 
vinced opponent  of  apocalyptic  eschatology. 
57 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

He  speaks  of  "the  sane  and  well-poised 
mind  of  the  plain  mechanic  of  Nazareth," 
and  regards  the  apocalyptic  elements  in  the 
Gospels  as  later  additions  made  by  "  the 
enthusiastic  Church."1  Yet  even  Profes- 
sor Bacon  says,  and  says  most  justly  : 
"  For  some  reason  Jesus  did  go  up  to  Jeru- 
salem, and  throw  down  the  gauntlet  in  the 
face  of  the  priestly  hierocracy  in  the  tem- 
ple itself.  For  some  reason  he  did  follow 
a  role  that  led  to  his  execution  by  Pilate 
as  a  -political  agitator.  For  some  reason 
his  followers,  very  shortly  after,  did  ascribe 
to  him  not  mere  reappearance  from  the 
tomb,  but  exaltation  to  the  place  of  the 
Messiah  '  at  the  right  hand  of  God'  —  at- 
tributes so  exalted  that  it  is  difficult  to  be- 
lieve they  had  no  other  foundation  than 
mere  reverence  for  an  admired  Teacher." 2 
And  again  (on  Mark  ix.  i):  "We  cannot 
do  honest  justice  to  the  unbroken  consensus 

1  Bacon,  Beginnings,  p.  108.  2  Beginnings,  p.  106. 

58 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

of  primitive  testimony  without  acknowledg- 
ing that  Jesus  pointed  his  disciples  to  the 
expected  intervention  of  God,  which  should 
be  the  vindication  of  his  gospel,  before  the 
generation  which  heard  and  rejected  it 
should  have  passed  away." '  This  is  well 
and  justly  said;  but  does  it  not  show  that 
formulas  like  "  the  sane  and  well-poised 
mind  of  the  plain  mechanic  of  Nazareth" 
arc  inadequate,  if  not  altogether  inappro- 
priate, as  a  characterization  of  Jesus?  If 
we  rationalize  overmuch  the  ideas  and  the 
hopes  of  Jesus  and  his  friends,  how  are 
we  to  account  for  their  invincible  enthusi- 
asm? 

"The  vindication  of  his  gospel" — but 
what  was  the  Gospel  of  Jesus?  According 
to  Mark  it  consisted  in  the  announcement 
that  the  Kingdom  of  God  was  at  hand.2 
Everything  else  was  inference  and  deduc- 
tion from  this  fundamental  idea. 

1  Beginnings^  p.  120.  *  Mark  i.  15. 

59 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

The  Kingdom  of  God  is  indeed  familiar 
to  us  as  a  religious  phrase,  but  the  concep- 
tion itself  is  strange,  because  at  this  period 
of  the  world's  history  no  one  but  the  social- 
ists are  expecting  a  great  change,  and  that 
a  change  for  the  better,  in  the  conditions 
of  human  life.  It  was  otherwise  with  the 
Jewish  nation  in  the  first  century  of  our 
era.  For  two  hundred  years,  ever  since  the 
martyrs  in  the  days  before  the  Maccabees, 
the  martyrs  who  had  preferred  to  die  rather 
than  give  up  the  customs  of  their  inherited 
religion,  the  struggle  between  Judaism  and 
civilization  had  gone  on.  The  military  suc- 
cesses of  Judas  Maccabaeus  and  his  family 
secured  to  all  the  Jews  the  undisturbed  exer- 
cise of  their  religion,  and  the  outward  his- 
tory of  Palestine  degenerated  into  an  en- 
tirely secular  and  somewhat  sordid  game  of 
politics,  with  the  irresistible  might  of  Rome 
looming  ever  more  insistently  in  the  back- 
ground. But  this  was  only  one  side  of  the 
60 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

great  duel.  It  was  a  war  of  ideas,  a  war 
between  civilization  and  religion,  in  the 
modern  sense  of  these  terms.  On  the  side 
of  the  Gentiles  was  philosophy,  science, 
art,  good  government,  all  the  material 
goods  of  this  life;  on  the  side  of  the  Jew 
was  the  ineradicable  conviction  that  the 
Lord  and  Maker  of  all  things  visible  and 
invisible  had  chosen  Israel  and  taught  it 
the  way  of  Life  and  Death,  and  that  in 
comparison  with  this  all  other  privileges 
and  advantages  were  as  nothing.  Judaism 
was  a  conscious  rival  to  civilization,  as 
civilization  was  then  understood.  That  the 
1  Gentiles '  were  aware  of  this  we  can  see 
from  the  references  to  the  Jews  in  con- 
temporary classical  literature,  where  they 
are  represented  as  a  strange  unnatural  race, 
distinct  from  other  human  beings. 

Such  a  condition  of  things  does  not  en- 
dure for  long.  An  isolated  race  cannot  per- 
manently maintain  its  ideals  in  the  face  of 
61 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

the  civilized  world.  In  the  political  sphere 
the  end  came  in  A.  d.  70,  when,  the  Jews 
having  at  last  broken  out  into  open  re- 
bellion against  the  Gentile  yoke,  the  Jew- 
ish State  was  destroyed  and  the  Temple 
worship  abolished.  The  Judaism  that  sur- 
vived, and  survives  to  this  day,  is  really 
rather  a  posthumous  child  of  the  older  Ju- 
daism than  the  older  Judaism  itself.  It  is 
rather  to  be  regarded  as  the  younger  sis- 
ter of  Christianity  than  its  mother.  The 
older  Judaism  perished,  but  its  children 
survived. 

During  the  long  struggle  with  the  world 
outside,  the  hopes  of  the  Jews  expressed 
themselves  in  forms  very  different  from 
what  actually  came  to  pass.  These  hopes 
find  expression  in  the  long  series  of  apoca- 
lyptic books  that  appeared  at  intervals 
throughout  the  whole  period,  from  the 
Book  of  Daniel  in  168  b.  c,  just  before  the 
Maccabaean  rising,  to  the  Apocalypse  of 
62 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

Baruch,  written  after  the  Destruction  of 
Jerusalem  by  Titus;  and  it  is  from  these 
books  we  can  trace  the  rise  and  develop- 
ment of  that  belief  in  the  coming  Kingdom 
of  God  which  is  assumed  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment. The  books  are  now,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  the  Book  of  Daniel,  rejected  both 
by  the  Rabbinical  Jews  and  by  nearly  all 
Christian  bodies;  for  when  the  New  Age 
came,  the  imperfect  forecasts  of  it  lost  their 
interest.  Rabbinical  Judaism  rejected  the 
hopes  which  belonged  to  a  time  when  the 
Jews  were  still  a  nation,  and  the  Christian 
Church  gradually  came  to  do  the  same,  al- 
though the  Church  was  in  a  special  sense 
the  heir  of  the  Apocalyptists. 

The  main  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God 
is  found  already  in  the  Book  of  Daniel.  The 
fundamental  notion  is  that  the  Most  High  is 
indeed  Autocrat,  He  alone  has  sovereignty, 
but  He  hands  it  over  for  a  time  and  for 
His  own  inscrutable  purposes  to  whomso- 

63 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

ever  He  will.1  At  any  given  moment  there 
is  a  world-power,  the  Babylonian,  the 
"  Median,"  the  Persian,  the  Seleucid  Greek. 
But  this  will  not  be  for  ever.  In  the  end 
the  Most  High  Himself  will  take  the  do- 
minion into  His  own  hands.  The  Kingdom 
of  God  Himself  will  be  inaugurated,  and 
He  will  reign  for  ever,  protecting  His  faith- 
ful people  and  rewarding  them  for  all  the 
trials  they  have  undergone  at  the  hands  of 
the  heathen. 

This  is  the  apocalyptic  hope.  It  is  the 
correlative  of  the  conflict  between  Jewish 
religion  and  the  Graeco-Roman  civilization. 
To  do  it  justice,  we  must  remember  that 
this  conflict  to  the  Jews  was  one  between 
religious  faith  and  material  civilization:  if 
the  Kingdom  of  God  were  to  come  at  all, 
it  would  come  not  by  material  weapons 
but  by  the  operation  of  God.  Material  force 
was  on  the  other  side.  And  so  the  Christian 

1  Daniel  iv.  17. 

64 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

is  taught  to  pray  u  Thy  Kingdom  come," 
because  it  is  for  God,  not  for  man,  to  bring 
it  in.  When  the  time  is  ripe,  it  will  come. 

The  Christ  or  Messiah,  that  is,  the 
Anointed  of  God,  is  one  of  the  features  of 
the  coming  Kingdom.  His  function  is  to 
judge  the  heathen  and  to  rule  as  God's 
Vicegerent  over  the  Saints,  when  the  Great 
Day  arrives.  The  Christ  does  not  bring  in 
the  Kingdom,  —  that  is  the  work  of  God 
Himself;  the  Christ  only  enters  on  his  of- 
fice when  all  is  ready.  He  is,  in  fact,  one 
of  the  personages  of  the  New  Age,  not  the 
person  through  whom  the  New  Age  is 
brought  in.  If  he  be  conceived  of  as  exist- 
ing beforehand,  then  he  is  not  yet  properly 
the  Christ.  It  is  most  important  to  keep 
this  in  mind  when  we  read  the  Gospels,  as 
otherwise  the  command  of  Jesus  that  Peter 
should  be  silent  about  his  Messiahship  be- 
comes incomprehensible.  Before  the  time 
Jesus  may  be  Messiah  in  God's  sight,  to 

65 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

whom  to  think  is  to  do.1  He  may  be  Mes- 
siah to  the  demons,  but  to  men  He  is  not 
yet  Messiah.  It  was  for  God  to  make  Him 
manifest,  not  for  men. 

Was  there  then  any  Scripture  that  had 
spoken  of  the  Messiah  before  he  became 
Messiah?  And  if  so,  by  what  title  had  he 
been  spoken  of?  The  answer  is,  that  he 
was  the  Man  from  Heaven  spoken  of  by 
Enoch. 

Here  we  come  to  the  closely  allied  ques- 
tions of  the  influence  of  the  Book  of  Enoch 
upon  primitive  Christianity,  and  of  the 
meaning  of  the  title  "Son  of  Man."  The 
Son  of  Man  —  as  curious  a  phrase  in  Greek 
as  in  English  —  is  a  literal  translation  of  the 
Aramaic  for  "the  human  being,"  "the  Man." 
It  is  evident  that  no  one  could  take  "  the 
Man"  as  a  title  for  himself  or  his  office 
without  something  further  being  under- 
stood. If  any  one  calls  himself  "  the  Man," 

1  Enoch  xiv.  22. 

66 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

it  must  mean  "  the  Man  —  you  know  who." 
When  therefore  Jesus  speaks  of  himself  as 
"the  Son  of  Man,"  a  phrase  in  Aramaic 
identical  with  "the  Man,"  he  must  mean 
"the  Man  —  you  know  whom  I  speak  of." 
And  when  we  notice  that  this  Man  is  one 
who  "  comes  with  the  clouds  of  heaven," 
with  whom  is  associated  functions  of  judg- 
ment at  the  great  Assize,  it  is  clear  that  the 
Man  who  is  meant  is  the  celestial  Man  of 
Daniel  vii.  13,  a  symbolical  figure  that 
stands  for  the  Kingdom  of  the  Saints,  in 
contrast  to  the  bestial  figures  that  come  up 
from  the  sea,  which  symbolize  the  heathen 
empires. 

In  Daniel  the  Man  is  not  individualized. 
He  stands  for  the  nation,  not  for  the  Mes- 
siah. But  in  the  Similitudes  of  Enoch,  the 
figure  of  Daniel,  the  Son  of  Man  who  was 
with  the  Ancient  of  Days,1  is  personified 
and  individualized.  From  of  old  this  Son 

1  Enoch  xlvi.  2. 

67 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

of  Man,  this  celestial  human  being,  has  been 
hidden  with  the  Most  High,1  but  one  day 
he  will  be  revealed.  The  kings  and  the 
mighty,  i.e.,  the  heathen  rulers  of  the  world, 
will  see  and  be  terrified  and  beg  for  mercy 
in  vain.  The  angels  will  drag  them  away 
to  punishment,  but  the  righteous  will  be 
saved  and  protected,  and  with  that  Son  of 
Man  they  will  rejoice  for  ever  and  ever.2 

The  Book  of  Enoch  is  a  strange  barba- 
rous work,  without  poetry,  without  charm. 
It  has  long  been  rejected  from  the  Bible  by 
every  branch  of  the  Church  save  the  bar- 
barian Christians  of  Abyssinia.  Are  we,  it 
may  be  asked,  really  to  seek  the  origin  of 
the  title  of  our  Lord,  round  which  so  many 
pathetic  associations  have  grown,  in  this 
fierce  and  narrow  Jewish  apocalypse?  And 
if  this  was  the  hope  of  the  Gospel,  was  it 
justified?  In  what  sense  can  it  be  said  that 
the  Kingdom  of  God  was  at  hand? 

1  Enoch  xlviii.  3-7.  a  Enoch  lxii.  II»  14. 

68 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

These  are  fundamental  questions  for  our 
estimate  of  Christianity,  but  they  are  equally 
fundamental  for  the  criticism  and  exegesis 
of  the  Gospels.  To  those  who  have  learned 
to  see  the  vital  principle  of  the  Christian 
movement  in  this  expectation  of  the  super- 
natural Kingdom  of  God,  sentence  after 
sentence  of  the  Gospels,  saying  after  saying, 
parable  after  parable,  falls  into  its  place. 
And  in  no  document  is  this  clearer  than  in 
the  Gospel  of  Mark.  The  answer  we  give 
to  the  second  question  will  depend  almost 
entirely  upon  our  personal  attitude  to  the 
Church,  to  the  Christian  movement  as  a 
whole.  Christianity  is  Judaism  recreated  in 
a  form  that  could  thrive  in,  and  finally  ab- 
sorb, the  civilization  of  Europe:  if  Chris- 
tianity be  of  God,  then  the  Kingdom  of  God 
did  come  to  men.  It  is  the  new  dispensa- 
tion of  the  Christian  Church;  "the  new 
race  of  Christians  " x  are  the  citizens  of  the 

1  The  phrase  is  used,  e.  g.,  by  Bardesanes. 

69 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Kingdom  of  God.  And  Jesus  Christ  is,  as 
Tacitus  had  rightly  heard,  "  the  originator 
of  that  name";  not  that  he  was  the  origi- 
nator of  the  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
or  that  he  was  the  teacher  of  the  Chris- 
tians, but  because  he  was  and  remained  the 
source  of  their  inspiration.  His  words  in 
part,  but  still  more  his  life  and  death,  kin- 
dled the  fire  of  the  Christian  movement. 

As  for  the  Book  of  Enoch,  the  evidence 
does  point  very  strongly  to  the  great  in- 
fluence it  exercised  on  primitive  Christian- 
ity. The  date  of  Enoch  is  a  matter  of  dis- 
pute, and  the  accepted  theory  is  that  it  is 
made  up  of  several  parts,  of  different  dates. 
But  it  is  certainly  Palestinian,  and  it  existed 
in  its  present  form  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era.  It  is  quoted  by  name  in 
the  Epistle  of  Jude,  a  letter  that  used  to  be 
dated  much  later  than  necessary,  as  long 
as  apocalyptic  ideas  were  out  of  fashion. 
It  is  certainly  referred  to  in  the  First  Epistle 
70 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

of  Peter,  whatever  the  date  of  that  work 
may  be;  and  it  was  long  held  in  honour 
among  the  Christians,  who  took  it  for  a 
genuine  prophecy  of  Enoch,  "  the  seventh 
from  Adam."  But  it  is  especially  in  the 
Gospels  that  we  see  its  influence,  in  Q^  as 
much  as  in  Mark.  The  theory  of  demons 
and  demoniacal  possession,  implied  in  Luke 
xi.  24-26  (Matthew  xii.  43-45),  a  passage 
certainly  drawn  from  Q^,  is  exactly  that  set 
forth  at  length  in  Enoch;  and  the  judg- 
ment scene  in  Matthew  xxv.  31  AT  ("the 
Sheep  and  the  Goats  ")  loses  half  its  mean- 
ing, if  the  corresponding  scene  in  Enoch 
lxii,  where  "the  Son  of  Man"  is  shewn 
"  sitting  on  the  throne  of  his  glory,"  be  not 
presupposed.  Enoch  is  crude  and  fierce, 
the  corresponding  words  of  the  Gospel  are 
instinct  with  spiritual  power.  Yes;  but 
"  that  is  not  first  which  is  spiritual,  but  that 
which  is  natural,  afterwards  that  which  is 
spiritual." 

7i 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

The  Gospel  of  Mark  tells  us  how  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  came  announcing  the  impend- 
ing advent  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  and  bid- 
ding those  who  heard  to  repent  and  prepare 
themselves.  The  population  of  Galilee  are 
generally  friendly,  but  then  as  always  the 
number  of  those  who  are  whole-hearted  is 
few:  the  people  as  a  whole  do  not  repent.1 
And,  to  adopt  the  imagery  of  Jesus'  own 
parable  of  the  Ear  of  Corn,2  if  the  fruit  be 
not  ripe,  how  can  it  be  expected  that  the 
Lord  of  the  Harvest  will  put  the  sickle  to 
the  corn  ?  How  can  it  be  expected  that  God 
will  bring  in  the  New  Age,  if  the  people  be 
not  ready?  Jesus  is  conscious  that  he  is 
the  destined  Messiah,  but  the  time  for  his 
manifestation  is  not  yet.  To  acclaim  him 
as  Messiah  before  the  Kingdom  of  God 
comes  is  premature.3  Meanwhile,  Jesus  has 

1  Mark  viii.  12,  38;  ix,  19. 

2  Mark  iv.  26-29. 

8  Mark  viii.  29,  30. 

72 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

another  work  before  him.   He  will  go  up 
to  Jerusalem. 

It  is  evident  from  all  the  Gospel  accounts 
that  the  adherents  of  the  Galilean  Prophet 
expected  something  great  from  the  journey 
to  Jerusalem.  But  Jesus  knows  that  he  is 
setting  out  on  a  forlorn  hope,  and  will  have 
no  one  to  follow  after  him  who  is  not  pre- 
pared to  give  up  everything  "for  the  Gos- 
pel."1 What  his  own  thoughts  about  this 
momentous  expedition  were  may  best  be 
gathered  from  the  Parable  of  the  Wicked 
Husbandmen.2  Perhaps,  after  all,  the  na- 
tion and  its  rulers  would  reverence  the  Son 
of  the  Lord  of  the  Vineyard,  and  would 
give  at  his  summons  the  fruit  of  devotion 
and  repentance.  But  it  is  clear  that  that 
was  not  the  result  that  Jesus  anticipated. 

1  Mark  viii.    34-36;  x.  21  ff. 

a  Mark  xii.  1-11.  See  Burkitt,  The  Parable  of  the  Wicked 
Husbandmen,  in  the  Proceedings  of  the  Third  Congress  of 
Religions,  Oxford,  1908,  vol.  ii,  321-328. 

73 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Unless  our  Gospels  embody  a  wholly  dis- 
torted tradition,  Jesus  expected  to  die  a 
violent  death  at  the  hands  of  the  rulers 
of  Jerusalem.  His  whole  course  of  action 
was  that  of  one  who  desires  to  precipitate 
a  crisis  which  he  believes  to  be  inevitable. 
He  did  not  announce  himself  as  Messiah, 
yet  he  acted  as  if  he  were  armed  with 
complete  authority.  He  refused  to  allow 
his  actions  to  be  supported  by  force;  God 
would  justify  him  in  due  time.  There 
was  an  hour  in  Gethsemane  when  he 
shrank  from  the  ordeal;  there  was  a  mo- 
ment on  the  cross  when  he  despaired. 
But  with  these  exceptions  he  carried 
through  the  part  of  the  Son  of  the  Lord 
of  the  Vineyard  without  flinching  to  the 
end. 

The  end  of  the  Gospel  of  Mark  is  muti- 
lated; the  narrative  breaks  off  suddenly  at 
xvi.  8,  in  the  midst  of  the  alarm  and  amaze- 
ment of  the  women  at  the  rock-cut  tomb, 

74 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

who  cannot  find  the  body  of  Jesus.  Had  the 
true  conclusion  been  preserved,  no  doubt 
we  should  have  read  of  that  appearance  of 
the  risen  Lord  to  Peter,1  which  seems  to 
have  been  psychologically  the  decisive 
rallying-point  of  the  scattered  and  disheart- 
ened disciples.  As  we  know,  the  new 
movement  did  not  come  to  an  end  with 
the  crucifixion.  The  Kingdom  of  God  was 
soon  to  be  made  manifest  (so  the  little 
band  that  rallied  round  Peter  continued  to 
believe),  for  their  Master  was  not  dead  but 
had  been  raised  to  heaven,  to  sit  at  God's 
right  hand,  till  the  Kingdom  came  at  last, 
when  Jesus  of  Nazareth  who  had  been  cru- 
cified would  appear  as  Christ,  as  the  Son 
of  Man  spoken  of  by  Daniel,  to  judge  the 
quick  and  the  dead. 

Perhaps  it  was  a  dream,  but  at  least  it 
was  a  dream  that  captured  the  ancient 
world,  and,  as  Professor  Bacon  says,  in  a 

x  i  Cor.  xv.  5 :  cf.  Mark  xvi.  7. 

75 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

phrase  already  quoted,  "  mere  reverence 
for  an  admired  Teacher"  is  not  sufficient 
to  account  for  the  hopes  and  the  claims  of 
the  Christians.  And  therefore  the  Gospel 
of  Mark,  which  makes  so  much  of  transcen- 
dental hopes  and  claims,  which  bases  so 
much  on  the  personal  ascendency  of  Jesus, 
is  more  likely  to  reflect  the  historical  truth 
than  any  view  which  regards  the  mission 
of  Jesus  as  "  purely  religio-ethical  and  hu- 
manitarian." ■ 

Considerations  of  the  kind  put  forward 
in  this  chapter  appeal  with  different  force 
to  different  minds,  and  it  must  be  acknow- 
ledged that  many  students  of  early  Chris- 
tianity still  hesitate  to  accept  the  tale  of 
the  public  career  of  Jesus  as  told  in  the 
Gospel  of  Mark,  though  it  be  the  oldest 
source  we  possess.  There  are  those  who 
try  to  read  between  the  lines,  who  think 

1  Bacon,  Beginnings,  p.  xxxviii. 

76 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

that  behind  the  cross-bars  of  Jewish  escha- 
tology  and  Pauline  theologizing  they  can 
discern  a  gracious,  if  shadowy  figure,  giv- 
ing utterance  to  "ethical  ideas  that  are 
the  essential  element  in  the  spiritual  ex- 
perience of  the  modern  world."  l  Professor 
Peabody,  from  whom  I  quote,  goes  on  to 
say :  "  There  is  nothing  apocalyptic  in  the 
parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan,  or  in  the 
appropriation  by  Jesus  of  the  two  great 
commandments,  or  in  the  prayer  for  to-day's 
bread  and  the  forgiveness  of  trespasses,  or 
in  the  praise  of  peace-making  and  purity 
of  heart.  Yet  in  these,  and  not  in  the  mys- 
terious prophecies  of  an  approaching  deso- 
lation, the  conscience  of  the  world  has 
found  its  Counsellor  and  Guide."3  Those 
who  put  the  centre  of  gravity  of  our  Lord's 
work  in  the  enunciation  of  sayings  such  as 

1  Professor   W.   Herrmann,   quoted   by  F.  G.  Peabody, 
Transactions  of  the  Oxford  Congress  of  Religions,  ii,  308. 
*  Ibid.,  p.  309. 

77 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

these  are  undoubtedly  dissatisfied  with  the 
proportions  of  the  portrait  sketched  in  the 
Gospel  of  Mark. 

A  detailed  reply  might  be  made  to  argu- 
ments like  Professor  Peabody's.  Indeed, 
the  apocalyptic  background  behind  much 
of  our  Lord's  ethical  teaching,  notably  that 
about  "  daily  bread,"  can,  I  think,  actually 
be  recognized.  But  however  this  may  be, 
for  the  student  of  history  the  first  necessity 
is  not  to  lay  emphasis  upon  those  parts  of 
the  remembered  words  of  Jesus  which 
happen  to  strike  an  immediate  chord  in  our 
ethical  consciousness.  The  first  necessity 
is  to  place  him  in  due  relation  to  the 
strange  and  far-off  time  in  which  he  lived 
among  men.  The  first  thing  we  have  to 
account  for  is  the  enthusiasm  and  the  de- 
votion of  those  who  claimed  to  be  his 
followers  and  apostles.  "  Let  the  children 
first  be  filled";  we  must  first  of  all  think 
of  our  Lord  in  connexion  with  the  aspira- 

78 


THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK 

tions  of  his  own  time  and  his  own  coun- 
try, and  be  ourselves  content  with  the 
crumbs  that  have  fallen  down  into  our 
very  different  world.  After  all,  the  table 
was  spread  for  the  lost  sheep  of  the  House 
of  Israel,  not  for  us. 

In  the  end,  a  frank  recognition  that  the 
Gospel  as  a  whole  looks  forward  to  near 
and  overwhelming  catastrophe  may  be 
found  not  inconsistent  with  due  reverence 
for  the  always  wonderful  sayings  that  light 
up  the  Gospel  story.  However  we  may 
look  at  it,  the  rise  of  Christianity  is  a  won- 
derful, a  most  wonderful  tale.  It  must  al- 
ways remain  a  portent  to  be  marvelled  at, 
a  thing  that  cannot  wholly  be  explained. 
And  it  is  therefore  not  surprising  that 
Jesus  himself  cannot  wholly  be  explained. 
It  is  not  likely  that  he  can  really  be 
comprehended  under  a  modern  formula, 
whether  ecclesiastical  or  unecclesiastical. 
And  therefore  it  is  not  likely  that  we  are 
79 


SOURCES   FOR   THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

getting  any  nearer  to  historical  truth,  when 
we  desert  the  earliest  ascertainable  histori- 
cal tradition  about  him,  the  tradition  that 
is  preserved  for  us  in  the  Gospel  according 
to  Mark. 


IV 


POSSIBLE  "  SOURCES  "  OF   THE  GOSPEL    OF 
MARK 


Tradition  says  that  the  Gospel  of  Mark 
embodies  St.  Mark's  reminiscences  of  what 
he  had  heard  St  Peter  say.  On  the  whole, 
this  is  doubted  by  modern  critics;  is  it  pos- 
sible to  obtain  any  plausible  view  on  the 
subject?  The  preceding  section  was  neces- 
sary, in  order  to  meet  the  general  objection 
that  Mark  gives  a  distorted  view  of  the 
Ministry;  but  how  does  the  case  stand  with 
regard  to  details?  Christian  tradition,  we 
may  remark,  does  not  represent  the  num- 
ber of  original  witnesses  that  were  avail- 
able as  large.  When  St.  Luke  is  describing 
the  election  of  a  thirteenth  apostle  to  take 
the  place  of  Judas  Iscariot,  he  makes  it 
plain  that  only  two  of  the  rallied  band  of 
81 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Disciples  had"  companied  "  with  Peter  and 
the  rest  from  the  beginning  of  the  Ministry. 
It  may  further  be  noted  that  the  question 
of  St.  Mark's  sources  has  been  greatly 
modified  by  the  progress  made  with  the 
Synoptic  problem.  So  long  as  our  three 
Gospels  according  to  Matthew,  Mark,  and 
Luke  were  believed  to  be  so  many  speci- 
mens of  a  common  Evangelical  tradition, 
it  seemed  impossible  to  particularize  the 
sources  of  individual  features  of  the  narra- 
tive. Tradition  connected  St.  Peter  with 
our  Second  Gospel,  but  there  is  little  in  it 
about  St.  Peter  that  is  not  shared  by  the 
others;  so  that  it  was  difficult  to  understand 
what  special  part  St.  Peter  could  have  had 
in  it.  But  now  conditions  are  changed.  The 
Gospel  of  Mark  is  not  simply  more  faithful 
than  the  others  to  the  Synoptic  norm:  it 
was  itself  the  originator  of  the  Synoptic 
norm,  the  direct  source  of  the  "  Synoptic  " 
element  in  the  others.  It  has  become  im- 
82 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES   OF  MARK 

probable  that  there  was  any  common  Evan- 
gelical tradition  at  all  about  the  course  of 
our  Lord's  Ministry.  We  no  longer  have 
to  ask  whether  Mark  has  a  better  claim 
than  Matthew  or  Luke  to  be  regarded  as 
the  Gospel  according  to  Peter;  we  have 
now  to  ask  whether  Mark  has  a  better 
claim  to  this  title  than  the  document  or 
documents  grouped  under  the  sign  Q^,  or 
than  the  Gospel  of  John,  or  than  the  types 
now  represented  by  various  fragments  from 
Oxyrhynchus.  If,  as  seems  likely,  we  have 
in  the  Gospel  of  Mark  the  tale  of  the  Min- 
istry of  our  Lord  told  for  the  first  time  as 
a  connected  whole  from  the  Voice  at  the 
baptism  till  after  his  resurrection,  what 
we  have  to  ask  is  how  far  this  narrative, 
this  general  scheme  of  the  Ministry,  is  based 
upon  what  the  Evangelist  had  gathered 
from  Simon  Peter.  It  may  be  as  well  to  re- 
mind ourselves  here  that  we  do  not  know 
how  far   the  narrative  extended  over  the 

83 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE   OF  JESUS 

ground  covered  by  St.  Luke's  Acts  of  the 
Apostles.  The  first  half  of  that  work  ends 
with  the  name  of  John  who  was  surnamed 
Mark,  and  it  is  plausible  to  suppose  that  it 
may  have  been  in  the  work  of  Mark  that 
our  Third  Evangelist  came  across  the  life- 
like episode  of  Rhoda.1 

Two  remarks  of  Wellhausen  about  the 
Gospel  of  Mark  may  here  be  recorded. 
"The  tradition  which  Mark  embodies  is 
comparatively  full  about  Jerusalem,  mea- 
gre about  Galilee";*  i.e.  the  one  Week 
in  Jerusalem  occupies  more  than  a  third 
of  the  whole  narrative.  And  again:  "The 
single  scenes  are  often  told  in  a  life-like 
style  without  unessential  additions  and  re- 
flections, but  they  stand  for  the  most  part 
as  a  mere  collection  of  disconnected  an- 
ecdotes."3 These  facts,  as  Wellhausen 
shows,  form  a  serious  objection  to  regard- 

1  Acts  xii.  13  £f.  2  Wellhausen,  Einleitung,  p.  52. 

3  Einleitung,  p.  51. 

84 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES  OF  MARK 

ing  Simon  Peter,  or  any  other  Galilean,  as 
the  planner  of  the  work;  but  I  venture  to 
think  they  are  consistent  with  the  author- 
ship of  "John  who  was  surnamed  Mark." 

There  is  one  incident  in  the  Gospel  of 
Mark  which  is  absolutely  pointless  as  it 
stands,  namely,  the  incident  of  the  youth 
who  tried  to  follow  Jesus  after  his  arrest  in 
the  Garden;  it  is  difficult  to  avoid  the  infer- 
ence that  the  youth  was  the  Evangelist  him- 
self, and  that  he  is  giving  his  personal  ex- 
perience. Can  we  doubt  that  it  was  he  who 
saw  and  heard  in  Gethsemane,  when  Peter 
and  James  and  John  were  sleeping?  It  may 
even  be  conjectured  that  the  Last  Supper 
itself  was  held  in  the  house  of  Mary  the 
mother  of  John  Mark,1  and  that  the  dating 
by  days,  almost  after  the  manner  of  a  diary, 
which  characterizes  the  story  from  Palm 
Sunday  onwards,  corresponds  to  actual 
reminiscences  of  the  author,  who  had  lived 

1  Cf.  Acts  xii.  12. 

85 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

through  the  events  of  that  memorable  week 
when  a  boy,  and  had  himself  been  a  witness 
of  some  of  them.  This  assumes  that  the 
final  visit  to  Jerusalem  did  indeed  only  last 
a  week,  but  I  have  endeavoured  to  show 
that  the  eschatological  point  of  view,  from 
which  alone  this  short  period  is  sufficient, 
is  the  true  historical  view. 

For  the  rest  of  the  Ministry  the  Evan- 
gelist must  have  been  dependent  on  the 
information  of  others,  and  his  narrative 
seems  to  me  to  be  very  much  the  kind  of 
narrative  that  one  in  the  position  of  John 
Mark  might  have  been  expected  to  com- 
pose. The  earliest  tradition  —  whatever  it 
may  be  worth  —  does  not  represent  Mark 
as  writing  in  the  lifetime  of  Peter.  The 
first  generation  of  Christians,  as  we  have 
already  seen,  took  little  thought  for  pre- 
serving "  the  beginning  of  the  Gospel  of 
Jesus  Christ,"  and  there  is  nothing  to  show 
that  the  Evangelist  had  taken  in  hand  to 
86 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES   OF  MARK 

draw  up  an  account  of  the  Ministry  until 
the  Apostles,  and  with  them  the  first-hand 
memory  of  eye-witnesses  of  our  Lord's 
public  career,  had  gone  to  their  long  home. 
The  memory  that  still  lived  was  that  of  the 
tales  which  the  eye-witness  used  to  tell: 
that  is,  striking  scenes  were  remembered, 
memorable  sayings,  memorable  anecdotes, 
rather  than  the  sequence  and  proportion  of 
the  whole  as  it  might  have  appeared  to  an 
outsider.  The  impression  I  get  on  reading 
the  Gospel  according  to  Mark  is  that  many 
of  the  tales  may  be  traditional,  told  perhaps 
again  and  again,  and  that  some  are  already 
on  the  point  of  becoming  conventionalized 
and  epic,  but  that  the  sequence  of  them, 
the  general  scheme  of  the  Ministry  as  a 
whole,  is  being  constructed  by  the  Evan- 
gelist for  the  first  time.  "  Mark  wrote  down 
accurately,  though  not  in  order,  all  that  he 
remembered "  ;  is  it  not  possible  that  the 
confused  statement  of  Papias  really  implies 

87 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE   OF  JESUS 

no  more  than  this,  that  no  traditional  se- 
quence, no  itinerary  of  our  Lord's  footsteps, 
was  ever  preserved  by  those  who  accom- 
panied him? 

Be  this  as  it  may,  the  Gospel  of  Mark, 
notwithstanding  that  it  is  the  foundation  for 
the  other  Synoptic  Gospels,  gives  us  only 
a  disjointed  narrative.  Up  to  viii.  27  it  is 
not  much  more  than  a  collection  of  anec- 
dotes. At  viii.  27  begins  the  journey  to 
Jerusalem  from  the  north:  from  that  point 
we  need  not  doubt  that  Mark  presents  a 
chronological  series  of  events,  though  even 
here  there  are  gaps  about  which  little  is 
said.  But  all  that  goes  before  might  more 
appropriately  be  called  "scenes  from  the 
Ministry  of  Jesus  "  than  an  account  of  the 
Ministry.  At  the  same  time  the  scenes, 
speaking  generally,  appear  to  be  arranged 
in  their  natural  order:  I  see  no  reason  for 
doubting  that  the  revival  in  Galilee,1  the 

1  Mark  i.  14  £. 

88 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES  OF  MARK 

call  of  Simon  with  the  first  preaching  at 
Capernaum,1  the  breach  with  the  Phari- 
sees,2 the  sending  out  of  the  twelve,3  "  the 
feeding  of  the  five  thousand"  followed 
by  wanderings  out  of  Galilee,4  the  voyage 
to  Bethsaida  and  on  to  Caesarea  Philippi,5 
represent  the  real  sequence  of  events.  Cer- 
tainly nothing  that  is  to  be  found  in  any 
other  of  the  Gospels  has  any  better  claim 
to  give  the  true  sequence. 

Minor  inaccuracies  of  the  Evangelist. 

There  are  certain  minor  inaccuracies  in 
the  Gospel  according  to  Mark  that  throw 
some  light  on  the  general  standard  of  trust- 
worthiness that  he  may  be  supposed  to  at- 
tain. In  Mark  ii.  26  he  represents  Jesus  as 
saying  that  David  entered  into  the  House 
of  God  and  ate  the  shewbread  when  Abia- 
thar  was  high  priest.6   This  is  a  mistake; 

1  Mark  i.  16-39.  2  ii.-iii.,  culminating  at  iii.  6. 

vi.  7  ff .  4  vi.  30-vii.  31. 

See  Swete's  note  on  the  passage. 

89 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

the  event  occurred  in  the  lifetime  of  Abia- 
thar,  but  the  high  priest  was  not  Abiathar, 
but  his  father  Ahimelech  (or,  as  some  au- 
thorities call  him,  Abimelech).  The  im- 
portance of  the  matter  is  that  it  shows  the 
Evangelist  to  have  had  a  certain  measure 
of  ignorance  or  carelessness,  whether  he 
were  John  Mark,  or  some  one  else.  The 
clause  is  omitted  by  Matthew  and  Luke, 
presumably  because  of  its  inconsistency 
with  the  Book  of  Samuel,  though  doubtless 
it  stood  in  the  copy  of  Mark  they  severally 
used.  We  learn  therefore  that  Mark  is  ca- 
pable of  perpetrating  a  historical  blunder 
in  a  matter  of  "Jewish  Antiquities,"  in  re- 
gard to  which  he  might  well  have  been 
better  informed. 

It  would  not  have  been  worth  while  to 
call  attention  to  this  well-known  piece  of 
inaccuracy,  were  it  not  that  there  are  sev- 
eral others  which  appear  to  me  to  be  of 
essentially  the  same  nature,  i.  e.  that  they 
90 


POSSIBLE   SOURCES  OF  MARK 

arise  simply  from  carelessness  and  confu- 
sion in  the  writer.1  As  however  certain  of 
them  seem  to  imply  an  inaccurate  know- 
ledge of  Jewish  customs  rather  than  an  in- 
accurate knowledge  of  the  Old  Testament, 
they  have  been  held  to  indicate  that  the 
Evangelist  had  not  himself  been  born  a  Jew. 
The  first  is  the  statement  in  Mark  vii.  3  ff, 
that  "  the  Pharisees  and  all  the  Jews  "  reg- 
ularly practised  certain  ablutions,  some  of 
which  (it  is  said)  were  practised  only  by 
those  of  priestly  descent.  Accepting  this 
correction,  we  may  surely  regard  the  exag- 
geration in  vii.  3  ff  as  merely  a  piece  of 
carelessness,  similar  to  that  about  Abiathar. 
If  Mark  was  the  cousin  of  Barnabas  the 
Levite,"  he  may  have  confused  ritual  that 
he  had  seen  practised  in  the  home  of  his 

1  It  may  be  noted  here  that,  according  to  Josephus,  the 
first  husband  of  Herodias  was  not  called  Philip,  as  in  Mark 
vi.  17,  but  Herod.  The  mistake  is  silently  corrected  in 
Luke  iii.  19. 

*  Colossians  iv.  10. 

9i 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

boyhood  with  the  customs  observed  by  all 
his  fellow  countrymen. 

The  other  matter  is  more  serious.  The 
Second  Evangelist  is  the  chief  authority 
for  identifying  the  Last  Supper  with  the 
paschal  meal,  an  identification  which  seems 
to  contradict  all  the  other  traditions  about 
the  date  of  the  crucifixion,  including  that 
which  served  as  the  foundation  for  the 
narrative  of  the  Second  Gospel  itself,  and 
to  be  exceedingly  improbable  historically. 
Moreover,  the  Evangelist  introduces  this 
peculiar  date  by  what  is  practically  a  con- 
tradiction in  terms.1  It  is  held  by  many 
scholars  that  no  Jew  could  have  perpetrated 
this  statement,  for  the  fifst  day  of  the  un- 
leavened bread  was  the  15th  of  Nisan;  but 
they  used  to  sacrifice  the  passover  on  the 
14th  of  Nisan.2 

1  Mark  xiv.  12  :   "  On  the  first   day   of  the  unleavened 
bread,  when  they  used  to  sacrifice  the  passover." 

2  According  to  our  reckoning  these  two  events  fell  on  the 
same  civil  day,  for  the  Jewish  day  begins  at  sunset.  The 

92 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES 

The  error  is  a  very  curious  and  import- 
ant one,  and  I  think  that  Professor  Bacon 
is  right  in  connecting  it  with  the  mainte- 
nance of  the  Roman  practice  of  celebrating 
Easter  always  on  a  Sunday,  and  not,  as 
the  ancient  churches  of  Asia  Minor  did,  by 
the  days  of  the  Jewish  month.1  Be  that  as 
it  may,  the  statement  in  Mark  xiv.  12  after 
all  only  argues  the  same  inattention  to  the 
Old  Testament  as  that  about  Abiathar  in 
Mark  ii.  26,  for  the  .statements  in  Leviticus 
xxiii.  5,  6,  about  the  dates  of  Passover  and 
Unleavened  Bread,  are  perfectly  clear  to 
every  one  that  reads  them,  be  he  Jew  or 
Gentile.  Moreover,  if  you  reckon  by  Ro- 
man (and  English)  days,  the  slaying  of  the 
paschal  lambs  and  the  eating  of  the  paschal 

first  day  of  Unleavened  Bread  (Nisan  15)  begins  at  sun- 
set, the  paschal  lambs  having  been  slain  a  few  hours  before 
on  what  we  should  call  the  same  day,  but  which  the  Jews 
reckoned  as  the  closing  hours  of  Nisan  14. 

1  Bacon,  Beginnings  of  Gospel  Story,  pp.  xxix  ff.,  195- 
198. 

93 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

meal  with  unleavened  bread  did  take  place 
on  the  same  "  day."  The  misdating  of  the 
Last  Supper,  whereby  the  Jewish  Passover 
is  turned  into  the  first  Christian  Eucharist, 
is  a  more  serious  matter  than  a  mere  care- 
less confusion  between  Jewish  and  Roman 
"days,"  but  it  is  quite  possible  that  the 
Easter  Eucharistic  Feast  was  already  re- 
garded in  Rome  as  the  Christian  equivalent 
of  the  Jewish  Passover  meal  when  St.  Mark 
wrote,  and  that  he  had  to  harmonize  this 
view  as  best  he  could  with  the  historical 
data  that  had  been  transmitted  to  him. 

A  word  may  be  said  here  upon  the  char- 
acter of  the  special  references  to  St.  Peter 
in  the  Gospel  according  to  Mark.  "  Sight 
by  hypnotic  suggestion  has  few  more  curi- 
ous illustrations  than  the  discovery  by 
writers  under  the  spell  of  the  Papias  tradi- 
tion of  traces  in  Mark  of  special  regard  for 
Peter!"  says  Professor  Bacon.1    But  why 

1  Beginnings,  p.  xxv. 

94 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES 

should  a  narrative  founded  upon  Peter's 
reminiscences  show  special  regard  for  Pe- 
ter? If  there  be  any  foundation  for  the  tra- 
dition which  connects  the  Gospel  of  Mark 
with  the  reminiscences  of  Simon  Peter, — 
and  apart  from  this  connexion  it  is  not  easy 
to  understand  how  this  Gospel  came  to  be 
preserved  at  all,  —  then  we  may  expect  to 
find  in  it  features  of  the  Ministry  of  Jesus 
that  were  really  fixed  in  Peter's  mind  rather 
than  adumbrations  of  "  Petrine  claims." 
Peter  may  never  appear  individually  on  the 
scene  except  for  purposes  of  rebuke,  as 
Professor  Bacon  remarks;1  but  is  this  feature 
of  the  narrative  unlikely  to  have  proceeded 
from  Peter  himself?  All  the  Gospels  tell 
the  story  of  Peter's  confession  of  Jesus  as 
the  Christ:  it  was  indeed  a  historical  mo- 
ment of  immense  importance  for  the  com- 
pany of  disciples.  But  is  it  psychologically 
unsuitable  that  the  Gospel  which  tradition 

1  Beginnings^  p.  xxvii. 

95 


SOURCES  FOR   THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

associates  with  the  reminiscences  of  Simon 
Peter  should  also  emphasize  the  rebuke 
which  the  Master  administered  to  him 
almost  at  the  moment  of  his  confession? 

Apart  from  this,  the  general  character  of 
the  Gospel  seems  to  me  to  harmonize  well 
enough  with  the  tradition  that  Mark's  main 
source  for  his  work  was  the  tales  he  had 
heard  from  St.  Peter.  It  is  from  the  time 
of  the  "call"  of  Peter  that  the  narrative 
first  becomes  particularized,  and  it  is  mainly 
round  the  Sea  of  Galilee  that  recorded  in- 
cidents occur.  Had  the  end  of  Mark  been 
preserved,  there  can  be  little  doubt,  from 
the  mention  of  Peter  in  xvi.  7,  that  we 
should  have  had  a  more  detailed  account 
of  what  Peter  saw  of  his  risen  Lord  than 
can  be  conjectured  from  Luke  xxiv.  34 
and  1  Corinthians  xv.  5.  The  real  objec- 
tion raised  against  regarding  St.  Peter  as 
the  main  authority  for  the  stories  told  in 
the  Second  Gospel  is  that  the  resulting  pic- 

96 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES 

ture  of  Jesus  Christ  is  inadequate  or  false. 
But  I  have  attempted  to  show  that,  if  we 
frankly  accept  the  eschatological  point  of 
view,  there  is  little  difficulty  in  accepting 
the  main  outlines  of  the  narrative  as  a  not 
unfaithful  picture  of  the  general  course  of 
the  Ministry. 

Not  all  the  tales  in  the  second  Gospel 
need  be  supposed  to  come  direct  from  St. 
Peter  or  from  the  youthful  reminiscences 
of  the  Evangelist.  I  have  elsewhere  x  sug- 
gested that  the  tale  of  the  Demoniac  and 
the  Swine a  may  have  come  to  the  Evangel- 
ist from  Gerasa  rather  than  direct  from  the 
companions  of  Jesus.  Where  and  how  the 
story  of  Herod  and  John  the  Baptist  took 
shape  it  is  impossible  to  say:  Josephus3  tells 
us  that  many  people  in  Galilee  regarded 
the  defeat  of  Antipas  by  the  Arabian  King 
Aretas,  his  aggrieved  father-in-law,  as  a 

1  Journal  of  Biblical  Literature,  xxvii.  132. 

•  Mark  v.  20.  3  Antiquities,  xviii.  5,  2. 

97 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

judgment  upon  him  for  his  unlawful  mar- 
riage with  Herodias. 

To  sum  up,  the  view  of  the  Gospel  ac- 
cording to  Mark  here  advanced  is  that  it 
is  a  work  put  together  by  one  who  seems 
to  have  been  present  as  a  youth  at  the 
arrest  of  Jesus  in  Gethsemane,  but  was  not 
otherwise  a  companion  of  the  Ministry.  A 
generation  later  he  formed  the  design  of 
writing  an  account  of  the  public  career  of 
the  Lord,  after  almost  all  the  witnesses  had 
died,  naturally  or  as  martyrs.  There  is  no 
valid  reason  to  doubt  that  during  some  part 
of  his  adult  life  he  had  accompanied  St. 
Peter,  and  that  he  has  derived  much  of  his 
material  from  what  Peter  had  told  him. 
But  there  is  nothing  to  make  us  suppose 
that  the  general  plan  of  the  work  comes 
from  St.  Peter,  or  that  the  first  half  of  it 
should  be  regarded  as  more  than  a  collec- 
tion of  anecdotes,  arranged  only  in  approxi- 
mate chronological   sequence.    From   the 

98 


POSSIBLE  SOURCES 

time  of  Peter's  confession  in  the  country  of 
Caesarea  Philippi  we  get  a  real  sequence 
of  events,  conditioned  by  the  real  nexus  of 
the  journey  south  to  Jerusalem,  though  the 
sequence  is  not  without  gaps.  For  the 
week's  stay  in  (or  rather,  near)  Jerusalem 
at  the  Passover,  we  have  a  chronological 
scheme  that  may  be  accepted  as  historical, 
though  it  is  disfigured  by  a  serious  incon- 
sistency, whereby  the  Last  Supper  is  reck- 
oned as  a  Paschal  Meal.  This  however 
was  dictated  by  liturgical  rather  than  his- 
torical reasons,  and  is  contradicted  by  the 
rest  of  the  narrative.  It  is  assumed  here 
that  the  Gospel  is  imperfect  at  the  end,  and 
it  is  regarded  as  not  unlikely  that  it  origi- 
nally extended  over  much  of  the  period 
covered  by  the  first  twelve  chapters  of  the 
Acts  of  the  Apostles. 


THE  COMPOSITION  OF  MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

The  reasons  which  lead  the  present 
writer  to  believe  that  we  cannot,  with  any 
approach  to  certainty,  reconstruct  Q^,  the 
lost  common  source  of  Matthew  and  Luke, 
have  been  already  given.  Something  may 
however  be  said  of  the  methods  which 
Matthew  and  Luke  seem  to  have  used  in 
treating  the  material  under  their  hand. 
From  the  way  that  they  use  the  Gospel  of 
Mark,  which  we  actually  possess,  we  may 
not  unfairly  conjecture  how  they  treated 
their  other  sources,  which  we  do  not  pos- 
sess. 

It  is  perhaps  advisable  to  point  out  in  the 
first  place  that  both  Matthew  and  Luke  treat 
Mark  with  entire  literary  freedom.  Mark 
ioo 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

is  used  by  the  other  evangelists  as  valuable 
material ;  but  they  freely  omit  what  seemed 
to  them  unsuitable  or  obscure,  they  add 
fresh  material  from  other  sources,  working 
it  into  the  Marcan  narrative,  each  in  accord- 
ance with  his  own  literary  methods,  and 
they  freely  change  the  wording  of  the  say- 
ings and  doings  of  Jesus.  But  while  they 
are  equally  free  in  dealing  with  Mark,  the 
manner  in  which  they  treat  it  is  different. 
Matthew  retains  nearly  all  the  material  of 
Mark,  and  a  plausible  reason  can  be  found 
for  the  omission  of  almost  every  verse  that 
he  does  omit.  But  the  matter  from  Mark  is 
often  welded  together  with  matter  from  else- 
where, in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  difficult 
to  separate   the    two  elements   in   detail.1 

1  E.  g.  Matt.  iv.  nb  doubtless  comes  from  Mark  i.  13*. 
The  story  of  the  Centurion  (Matt.  viii.  5-13)  and  that  of 
the  two  would-be  followers  (viii.  19-22)  are  inserted  in  the 
middle  of  a  whole  set  of  anecdotes  taken  from  Mark.  Matt. 
xii.  22-32  is  welded  together  from  Mark  iii.  20-30  and  from 
the  source  of  Luke  xi.  14-23,  xii.  10. 
IOI 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Luke,  on  the  other  hand,  omits  a  good  deal 
of  Mark,  but  what  he  retains  does  not  ap- 
pear to  be  mixed  with  material  gathered 
from  elsewhere.  The  wording  is  often 
greatly  altered,  but  this  comes  from  the  lit- 
erary style  and  method  of  Luke,  not  from 
the  introduction  of  fresh  documents.  More- 
over Luke  follows  the  order  of  Mark  in  the 
sections  based  upon  Mark,  while  Matthew 
entirely  rearranges  the  order  of  Mark's 
anecdotes  of  the  early  part  of  the  Galilean 
Ministry. 

These  characteristic  differences  can  be 
expressed  in  a  single  sentence.  The  Gospel 
according  to  Matthew  is  a  fresh  edition  of 
Mark,  revised,  rearranged,  and  enriched 
with  new  material  ;  the  Gospel  according 
to  Luke  is  a  new  historical  -work,  made  by 
combining  parts  of  Mark  with  parts  of  other 
documents. 

Generalisations  like  this  have  always  in 
them  something  of  over-statement  and  of 
102 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

paradox.  The  essential  point  is,  that  while 
the  additions  to  the  Marcan  framework  in 
Matthew  have  been  combined  and  altered 
by  the  evangelist  to  fit  them  into  their  place 
in  that  framework,  the  non-Marcan  matter 
in  Luke  has  not  been  combined  with  the 
Marcan  matter.  It  would  be  impossible  to 
reconstruct  the  first  five  chapters  of  Mark 
out  of  the  Marcan  matter  preserved  in  Mat- 
thew iii-xiii.  52,  although  almost  every  in- 
cident and  parable  is  more  or  less  ade- 
quately represented,1  because  the  anecdotes 
have  been  entirely  rearranged,  and  many  of 
them  have  been  interpolated  with  sayings 
of  Jesus  derived  from  other  sources.  The 
non-Marcan  material  has  no  doubt  been 
treated  in  the  same  way,  that  is,  it  has  been 
rearranged  and  recast  by  the  evangelist. 
Sayings  of  Jesus  upon  cognate  topics  have 
been  grouped  together,  whether  with  the 

1  The  exceptions  are  Mark  i.  23-27,  35-39,  Hi.  9-12,  21, 
iv.  26-29. 

103 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

Marcan  material,  or  otherwise  (as  in  the 
so-called  "  Sermon  on  the  Mount "),  so  that 
we  cannot  hope  to  reconstruct  the  original 
connexion  of  this  non-Marcan  material  at 
all  from  the  position  it  has  come  to  occupy 
in  the  Gospel  of  Matthew.  In  the  latter  part 
of  this  Gospel  Mark  is  followed  strictly. 
Hardly  anything  of  any  length  is  omitted, 
though  many  fresh  collections  of  sayings 
and  a  few  fresh  incidents,  such  as  the  earth- 
quakes at  the  Death  on  the  Cross  and  at  the 
appearance  of  the  Angel  at  the  Resurrec- 
tion, are  introduced  into  the  framework  of 
the  Marcan  narrative.  Whatever  the  origin 
or  value  of  these  additions,  they  appear  in 
Matthew  as  additions  and  enrichments  to 
the  main  framework ;  it  would  be  fruitless 
to  endeavour  to  restore  their  original  con- 
text from  the  use  made  of  them  by  Matthew. 
With  the  Gospel  of  Luke  it  is  different. 
In  Luke  much  of  Mark  is  omitted,  and  the 
thread  of  the  Marcan  narrative  is  often 
104 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

dropped  altogether.  But  where  Mark  is 
being  followed,  it  is  followed  to  the  exclu- 
sion of  other  sources  and  is  generally  taken 
up  again  almost  at  the  place  where  it  had 
been    dropped.1    The    question    therefore 

1  Luke  follows  Mark  throughout  five  sections  of  his  Gos- 
pel, viz. 

Luke  iv.  31-44    corresponds  to  Mark  i.  21-39 

v.  12-vi.  19  *      i.  40-iii.  19 

viii-4-ix.  50  "       iii.  31-ix.  40 

(with  gaps) 
xviii.  15-43  ■       x.  13-52 

xix.  29-xxii,  14     "  "       xi.  i-xiv.  17 

In  these  five  sections  the  only  non-Marcan  matter  is 
Luke  v.  39,  xix.  39-44.  Much  of  Mark  that  falls  within  the 
compass  of  these  sections  is  omitted,  viz.  Mark  iii.  20-30, 
vi.  1-6,  17-29,  vi.  45-viii.  26,  x.  35-45,  and  various  bits  of 
xi-xiv.  But  very  little  has  been  dropped  at  the  beginnings 
and  ends  of  these  sections  of  Luke.  Luke  v.  12  takes  up 
Mark  where  it  had  been  left  at  Luke  iv.  44.  Only  Mark 
iii.  20-30  is  passed  over  between  Luke  vi.  19  and  viii.  4, 
and  only  Mark  ix.  41-x.  12  (i.  e.  20  verses  only)  is  passed 
over  between  Luke  ix.  50  and  xviii.  15,  while  nothing  of 
Mark  is  dropped  between  Luke  xviii.  43  and  xix.  29.  The 
only  serious  transposition  of  the  Marcan  matter  in  these 
sections  is  that  Mark  iii.  31-35  (4k  Who  is  my  Mother  or  m\ 
Brethren?")  is  placed  after  the  Parables  instead  of  before 
them. 

105 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

naturally  arises  whether  the  non-Marcan 
material  in  Luke  may  not  have  been  treated 
in  much  the  same  way,  that  is  to  say,  that 
the  non-Marcan  material  stands  in  Luke  in 
the  same  order  as  it  stood  in  the  document 
or  documents  out  of  which  Luke  derived 
them,  and  that  the  thread  of  it  is  taken  up 
almost  at  the  places  where  it  has  been  suc- 
cessively dropped. 

It  is  remarkable  how  coherent  a  narra- 
tive of  our  Lord's  Ministry  we  get  if  we 
study  the  non-Marcan  material  in  Luke  by 
itself.  In  outline  it  runs  as  follows  :  After 
the  Baptism  and  Temptation  Jesus  left 
"  Nazara  " x  and  came  to  the  Sea  of  Gen- 
nesaret,  where  Simon  Peter  became  his 
disciple.2  We  hear  of  Jesus  at  Capernaum3 
and  at  Nain,4  as  he  goes  "  through  city  and 
village,  bringing  the  announcement  of  the 

x  Luke  iii-v.  i  £f. ;  note  the  spelling  Nazara  in  Luke  iv. 
16,  which  reappears  in  Matt.  iv.  13. 
2  Luke  v.  1  ff.  3  Luke  vii.  1.  4  Luke  vii.  11. 

I06 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

Kingdom  of  God,  and  the  Twelve  with 
him  and  certain  women,"  of  whom  three 
are  named.1  Then,  "  when  the  days  of  his 
ascension  were  fulfilled,  he  set  his  face 
to  go  to  Jerusalem,"3  passing  Samaritan 
country  on  the  way,3  though  most  of  the 
anecdotes  here  related  still  involve  a  Gali- 
lean setting,  with  synagogues  and  Pharisees 
and  "multitudes"  of  hearers.4  After  the 
parable  of  the  Pharisee  and  the  taxgatherer 
comes  the  story  of  Zacchseus  the  taxgath- 
erer.5 So  Jesus  journeys  on,  going  up  to 
Jerusalem,  and  when  he  comes  near  he 
weeps  over  it.6  Little  is  said  by  Luke  of  the 
public  activity  of  Jesus  in  Jerusalem  that 
is  not  taken  from  Mark,  but  we  are  given 
a  fresh  account  of  the  Last  Supper,7  and 

1  Luke  viii.  1-4.  2  Luke  ix.  51  £f  ;  xiii.  22. 

3  Luke  ix.  52,  xvii.  11. 

4  Luke  xiii.  10,  xiv.  1 ;  x.  25,  xi.  37,  xiii.  31,  etc.;  xi.  14, 
xiv.  25,  etc. 

5  Luke  xviii.  9-14,  xix.  1  ff. 

6  Luke  xix.  28,  41-44.       7  Luke  xxii.  15,  16,  21,  24-38. 

I07 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

much  of  the  Trial  of  Jesus  is  independent 
of  Mark,  together  with  nearly  all  the  Lucan 
account  of  the  Resurrection. 

It  is  as  impossible  to  reconstruct  St. 
Luke's  sources  from  St.  Luke's  own  nar- 
rative by  the  help  of  our  knowledge  of  his 
literary  methods,  as  it  is  to  reconstruct  Q^ 
from  the  common  matter  of  Matthew  and 
Luke.  But  it  seems  to  me  that  we  do 
catch  a  glimpse  of  this  other  source  of 
Luke,  especially  when  we  join  together, 
as  I  think  we  have  a  right  to  do,  Luke  viii. 
1-4  and  ix.  5 1  ff .  And  then  we  must  ask 
if  this  source  can  be  anything  else  but  Q^ 
itself? 

I  doubt  very  much  whether  we  can  get 
much  beyond  this  stage  of  queries  and  un- 
certainties. But  it  is  well  to  insist  upon 
the  fact  of  our  uncertainty,  in  order  to 
avoid  building  pleasing  but  insecure  theo- 
ries upon  unsound  literary  foundations.  Q^ 
remains  an  unknown  quantity,  for  all  that 
108 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

some  students  have  begun  to  treat  Har- 
nack's  reconstruction  of  it  (or  its  practical 
equivalent)  as  if  it  had  been  really  dis- 
covered, and  as  if  we  knew  both  what  it 
contained  and  what  it  left  out  of  the  Gospel 
History. 

There  are  two  theories  popular  at  the 
present  time,  which  seem  to  me  especially 
insecure  :  viz.,  the  theory  that  (^contained 
no  story  of  the  Passion  and  the  theory  of 
the  "  Peraean  Document." 

The  theory  that  (^contained  no  story  of 
the  Passion  rests  on  the  absence  from 
Matthew,  in  the  Story  of  the  Passion,  of 
any  fresh  material  that  reappears  in  Luke. 
Assuming  this  argument  to  be  decisive  (as 
Harnack  and  others  do),  and  remembering 
also  that  Qjs  no  mere  collection  of  Say- 
ings of  Jesus,  but  a  document  that  con- 
tained the  stories  of  the  Baptism  and 
Temptation  of  Jesus  and  of  the  healing  of 
the  Centurion's  son— a  document  moreover 
109 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

which  gave  prominence  to  the  eschatologi- 
cal  hope/  we  should  be  forced  to  the  con- 
clusion that  it  must  have  been  compiled  at 
a  very  early  date,  when  the  first  generation 
of  disciples  was  still  living  and  the  Death 
and  Resurrection  of  the  Lord  was  still  not 
regarded  as  typical  of  an  experience  which 
all  Christians  must  undergo.  This  is  the 
stage,  to  use  the  striking  phrase  of  Pro- 
fessor Lake,  when  not  "  Christ  is  risen"  but 
Maranatha  ("Our  Lord,  come!")  was 
the  watchword  of  Christianity. 

But  such  deductions  assume  the  main 
theory  that  the  unknown  Q^had  no  Pas- 
sion-story. This  still  seems  to  me  doubtful: 
I  would  sooner  believe  that  the  peculiar 
element  in  the  Lucan  Passion-story  was 
derived  from  Q^  It  is  true  that  we  have  in 
the  "Didache"  a  Christian  document  that 
makes  much  of  the  watchword  Marana- 

1  E.  g.  Luke  xii.  35  ££.,  xvii.  20-37,  xx»*  28-3°>  and  tne 
parallels  in  Matthew. 

IIO 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

tha  and  all  that  it  implies,  while  it  is  silent 
about  the  Passion.  But  the  "Didache" 
does  not  profess  to  relate  the  Gospel  story 
at  all :  I  find  it  difficult  to  believe  that  a 
document  like  Q^which  on  any  hypothesis 
goes  into  some  detail  about  the  Ministry 
of  Jesus,  could  have  been  silent  about  the 
end  of  his  earthly  career.  Had  Q^been  a 
mere  collection  of  sayings  the  silence 
would  have  been  credible,  but  we  are 
obliged  to  allow  for  the  presence  of  the 
story  of  the  healing  of  the  Centurion's 
boy. 

And  I  venture  to  think  that  the  absence 
of  Lucan  parallels  in  Matthew's  story  of 
the  Passion  is  not  so  very  surprising,  when 
we  regard  the  Gospel  according  to  Matthew 
as  what  I  have  called  it  above  ;  viz.,  a 
fresh  edition  of  Mark  rather  than  a  new 
historical  work.  Many  and  important  as 
are  the  additions  which  Matthew  makes 
to  Mark,  it  is  noteworthy  that  very  few  of 
in 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

them  interrupt  the  actual  course  of  the 
narrative.  The  "  Sermon  on  the  Mount " 
takes  three  chapters,  but  in  time  and  place 
it  corresponds  to  Mark  iii.  13.  Matthew  x. 
corresponds  to  Mark  vi.  7-1 1.  Mark  iv. 
33  tells  us  that  "with  such  parables" Jesus 
spoke  to  them  the  Word;  Matthew  in 
chapter  xiii.  gives  half  a  dozen  of  these 
parables.  And  this  is  carried  out  all 
through  the  Gospel;  the  added  Sayings  of 
Jesus  and  the  few  added  anecdotes  all  slip 
easily  into  the  Marcan  framework.  They 
have  been  torn  from  their  original  context 
and  fitted  into  Matthew's  slightly  revised 
edition  of  Mark,  to  serve  as  illustrations 
and  enrichments.  If  Q^did  contain  a  Pas- 
sion-story and  Matthew  made  use  of  it,  we 
need  not  be  surprised  to  find  fragments  of 
it  elsewhere  than  in  the  Passion-story  of 
Matthew,  because  Matthew  is  not  combin- 
ing Q^with  Mark,  but  enriching  and  illus- 
trating Mark  from  Q^and  other  sources. 
112 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

For  these  reasons  I  think  it  quite  probable 
that  Q^  had  a  story  of  the  Passion,  and  I 
think  it  not  unlikely  that  some  of  it  is  pre- 
served among  the  peculiar  sections  of 
Luke  xxii-xxiv.1 

The  other  theory  that  seems  to  me  haz- 
ardous is  the  identification  of  the  so-called 
"  Peraean "  source  of  Luke.  In  its  crudest 
form  this  theory  regards  the  long  section, 
Luke  ix.  51-xviii.  14,  which  corresponds 
roughly  to  the  single  verse  Mark  x.  1,  as 
giving  from  some  peculiar  source  an  ac- 
count of  the  teaching  of  Jesus  during  his 
journey  to  Jerusalem  through  Peraea,  the 
country  on  the  other  side  of  Jordan.3  But 
much  of  this  section  obviously  belongs  to 
Q^  (e.  g.  ix.  57-61,  x.  13-15),  and  we  have 
seen  that  its  opening  words  seem  to  form 
the  continuation  of  Luke  viii.  1-4.  It  seems 

1  Notably  in  Luke  xxii.  15  f.,  24-32,  35-38. 

2  It  should  be  noted  that  according  to  Luke  our  Lord 
goes  through  Samaritan  villages,  and  never  is  represented 
to  have  crossed  the  Jordan  at  all. 

113 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

to  me  impossible  to  distinguish  "  Luke's 
special  source/'  as  it  is  sometimes  called, 
from  Q^  itself,  while  we  must  not  forget 
that  the  unity  of  the  fragments  which  mod- 
ern scholars  have  called  Q^  is  still  an  un- 
proven  hypothesis.  What  was  the  source 
from  which  Luke  derived  the  parables  of 
the  Good  Samaritan,  the  Prodigal  Son,  the 
Unjust  Judge,  the  Pharisee  and  the  Publi- 
can? I  fear  it  must  continue  to  remain  un- 
certain. They  have  come  to  us  from  St. 
Luke's  hands,  and  we  are  left  to  conjecture 
whence  he  came  to  know  them,  or  what 
amount  of  rewriting  they  may  have  received 
when  he  incorporated  them  into  his  work. 

The  plan  of  this  little  book  does  not  in- 
clude a  discussion  of  the  historical  value  of 
the  Fourth  Gospel,  or  of  the  remarkably 
divergent  stories  of  the  Birth  of  Christ 
which  form  the  preface  to  the  Gospel,  ac- 
cording to  Matthew  and  Luke.  There  can 
114 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

be  no  doubt  that  the  earliest  sources  for  the 
Life  of  Jesus  are  the  Gospel  of  Mark  and 
the  source  (or  sources)  which  it  is  con- 
venient to  call  Q^.  What  has  here  been  at- 
tempted has  been  to  vindicate  the  general 
historical  faithfulness  of  the  picture  of  our 
Lord's  Ministry  sketched  in  Mark,  and  to 
plead  for  caution  in  dealing  with  the  un- 
known Q^,  a  document  which  the  extant 
evidence  does  not  allow  us  to  reconstruct 
in  detail. 

Were  the  reconstruction  of  Q^  possible, 
were  the  unlikely  to  happen  and  a  copy  of 
this  long-lost  product  of  primitive  Christian- 
ity to  be  dug  up  by  the  spade  of  a  modern 
investigator,  it  would  indeed  be  a  histori- 
cal jewel  of  inestimable  value.  As  matters 
stand,  the  jewel  as  a  whole  is  for  us  irre- 
coverable, but  we  have  in  Matthew  and 
Luke  many  of  the  detached  gems  out  of 
which  it  was  composed.  And  so  much  has 
been  said  in  these  pages  of  the  superior  his- 

"5 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

torical  value  of  the  Gospel  of  Mark,  as  com- 
pared with  those  of  Matthew  and  Luke,  that 
it  may  be  well  to  conclude  by  pointing  out 
the  very  considerable  degree  of  faithfulness 
and  historical  intelligence  which  these  two 
evangelists  exhibit  in  essentials,  however 
much  the  modern  investigator  may  find  the 
naive  and  unhellenic  narrative  of  Mark 
more  useful  as  a  basis  from  which  to  work. 
For  the  same  method,  —  the  comparison 
of  the  narrative  of  Mark  as  reproduced  in 
Matthew  and  Luke  with  the  text  of  Mark 
itself, — which  showed  us  that  we  could 
not  reconstruct  Mark  as  a  whole  from  its 
use  by  Matthew  and  Luke,  shows  at  the 
same  time  that  the  parts  of  Mark  which 
have  been  so  used  are  retold  without  essen- 
tial injury.  We  stand  indeed  further  off  from 
the  scene,  and  we  can  no  longer  discern 
some  characteristic  lines  in  the  Portrait  of 
Jesus,  when  we  look  at  it  from  the  point  of 
view  of  Matthew  or  Luke  instead  of  that 
116 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

of  Mark  ;  but  the  figure  is  the  same  in  es- 
sentials. As  Matthew  and  Luke  have  treated 
Mark,  so  no  doubt  they  have  treated  Q^, 
and  if  they  have  retained  the  essential  when 
they  have  made  use  of  Mark  they  will  have 
retained  the  essential  when  they  have  made 
use  of  Q^. 

The  very  considerable  amount  of  the 
wording  of  Mark  that  Matthew  has  re- 
tained, while  it  is  among  the  chief  pieces 
of  evidence  that  prove  Mark  to  have  been 
used  by  him,  is  also  a  proof  that  it  has  been 
used  with  fidelity.  But  more  than  this,  the 
general  arrangement  of  the  Gospel  accord- 
ing to  Matthew  shows  that  Mark  has  been 
used  with  intelligence  and  skill.  The  divi- 
sions of  the  narrative  that  Matthew  empha- 
sizes are  the  real  turning  points.  The  first 
part  of  the  Ministry  leads  up  to  Peter's 
confession  of  Jesus  as  the  Messiah,  and  the 
second  part,  containing  the  story  of  the 
Journey  to  Jerusalem  and  the  Doctrine  of 
117 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

the  Cross,  starts  off  at  Matthew  xvi.  21 
with  the  same  formula  ("  From  then  be- 
gan Jesus  .  .  .  ")  as  is  used  in  iv.  17  to 
begin  the  first  part.  Much  of  the  matter 
taken  from  Mark  in  the  first  part  has  indeed 
been  rearranged,  but  after  all  it  was  little 
more  in  the  original  than  a  collection  of 
anecdotes.  The  decisive  moment  of  the  open 
rupture  between  Jesus  and  the  Pharisees 
in  the  Synagogue x  has  been  not  inappropri- 
ately deferred,  and  it  is  emphasized  after 
the  evangelist's  manner  by  a  formal  quota- 
tion from  the  Old  Testament.  In  the  second 
part  of  the  Ministry  Matthew  follows  Mark 
paragraph  by  paragraph,  merely  condensing 
what  seemed  to  be  superfluities  and  adding 
here  and  there  fresh  sayings  and  legends. 
Some  of  the  freshness  of  Mark  is  gone,  and 
the  style  has  a  certain  hieratic  and  set  char- 
acter, which  seems  like  a  premonition  of 
future  ecclesiastical  use.  No  one  can  doubt 

1  Matt.  xii.  14,  corresponding  to  Mark  iii.  6. 

118 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

that  the  Gospel  of  Matthew  is  better  suited 
than  the  Gospel  of  Mark  for  reading  aloud 
in  church.  But  both  tell  the  same  story;  the 
outlines  of  the  picture  remain  the  same. 
May  we  not  therefore  believe  that  Q^  was 
treated  with  similar  intelligence,  even 
though  the  plan  of  Matthew  did  not  allow 
the  fragments  taken  from  Q^  to  cohere  in 
their  original  context? 

As  we  have  seen,  the  plan  of  the  Gos- 
pel of  Luke  is  very  different  from  that  of 
Matthew:  it  is  a  combination  of  Mark 
with  other  sources  rather  than  an  enrich- 
ment of  Mark  from  other  sources.  Much 
of  Mark  was  dropped  altogether  in  the 
process,  including  the  general  plan  of  the 
work.  The  Ministry  of  the  Christ  has  be- 
come timeless:  "the  acceptable  year  of 
the  Lord  "  is  a  moment  of  which  the  com- 
ponent parts  are  practically  indistinguish- 
able, except  that  it  ends  with  the  arrival 
at  Jerusalem  and  the  Passion;  we  lose 
119 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

sight  of  the  story  told  by  Mark  as  a  con- 
nected whole.  But  the  parts  of  Mark  that 
are  retained  are  faithfully  treated;  they 
are  given  in  their  proper  order  and  are 
very  little  mixed  with  other  matter.  We 
have  therefore  some  reason  for  assuming 
that  Luke's  other  sources  have  been  given 
in  their  proper  order,  without  much  ex- 
traneous mixture.  The  evangelist  indeed 
professes  to  write  "in  order"  (Luke  i.  3), 
and  judging  by  his  treatment  of  that  one 
of  his  sources  which  we  actually  possess, 
this  appears  to  mean  that  he  has  preferred 
to  dovetail  them  together  rather  than  make 
a  new  arrangement  of  their  contents. 

One  special  point  may  be  singled  out.  It 
has  often  been  noticed  that  St.  Luke's 
Gospel  is  eminently  the  Gospel  of  women. 
The  Nativity  story  is  told  from  the  wo- 
man's point  of  view :  the  woman  that 
was  a  sinner,  the  women  who  minister  to 
Jesus,  "  the  daughter  of  Abraham "  who 
120 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

was  healed,  the  "daughters  of  Jerusalem  " 
who  stand  on  the  way  to  the  Crucifixion, 
the  Woman  with  the  Ten  Pieces  of  Silver, 
the  Importunate  Widow  —  all  these  have 
come  down  to  us  only  through  the  Gospel 
of  Luke.  It  is  therefore  worth  notice  that 
no  sympathetic  elaborations  are  given  to 
the  stories  of  women  taken  from  Mark's 
Gospel.  The  stories  of  Peter's  wife's 
mother,  of  the  Woman  with  an  Issue,  and 
of  the  Widow's  Mites,  are  repeated  in 
Luke  from  Mark,  but  no  prominence  is 
given  to  them;  they  are,  in  fact,  somewhat 
curtailed.  It  seems  therefore  that  the  char- 
acteristic sympathy  given  to  women  and 
the  stress  laid  upon  the  women's  part  in 
the  Ministry  of  Jesus,  belong  rather  to  one 
or  more  of  Luke's  sources  than  to  Luke 
himself. 

However  that  may  be,  we  cannot  doubt 
that   all    the    sources  used   by  Luke   are 
given  by  him  to  us  with  certain  character- 
121 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

istic  alterations.  His  Gospel  is  like  a  new- 
building  made  with  old  stones  :  they  have 
been  trimmed  at  the  edges  to  make  them 
fit,  or  at  the  least  have  been  repointed  with 
fresh  mortar.  We  can  see  this  for  ourselves 
in  the  case  of  the  stories  taken  from  Mark, 
and  doubtless  the  same  process  has  been 
at  work  in  the  others.  When  Mark  gives 
us  the  story  of  the  man  sick  of  the  palsy, 
he  tells  us  that  it  was  at  Capernaum,  that 
there  was  a  crowd  of  the  inhabitants  at  the 
door  and  that  "  some  of  the  scribes  "  were 
sitting  by;1  in  Luke  the  place  is  left  vague, 
but  sitting  by  are  "  Pharisees  and  Teachers 
of  the  Law  who  had  come  from  every 
village  of  Galilee  and  Judaea  and  Jerusa- 
lem."2 Caesarea  Philippi  and  the  last  visit 
to  Capernaum  are  not  mentioned  by  Luke. 
We  cannot  therefore  assume,  as  has  been 
done  by  some  scholars,  that  the  sources 
from  which  Luke  drew  besides  Mark  were 

1  Mark  ii.  1-6.  *  Luke  v.  17. 

122 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

themselves  destitute  of  place-names  or  of 
indications  of  time. 

It  all  comes  to  this,  that  we  can  do  very 
little  toward  reconstructing  the  unknown 
sources  used  by  Matthew  and  Luke,  and 
that  we  have  to  depend  on  the  faithfulness 
and  intelligence  of  these  writers,  as  well 
as  on  the  excellence  of  the  material  they 
made  use  of.  Our  chief  guide  is  the  ana- 
logy afforded  by  their  use  of  the  Gospel  of 
Mark,  which  we  do  possess  and  which  is 
by  far  the  most  valuable  source  for  the  Life 
of  Jesus  now  extant.  And  those  who  take 
in  hand  to  draw  up  an  account  of  the  few 
decisive  months  of  the  public  career  of  Je- 
sus the  Nazarene  must  follow  the  method 
rather  of  the  Gospel  of  Matthew  than  of 
the  Gospel  of  Luke.  We  may  attempt  to 
enrich  and  fill  in  the  bare  outline  given 
in  Mark,  but  Mark  must  remain  through- 
out the  basis  and  foundation  of  the  whole. 
If  the  outline  given  in  Mark  be  not  histor- 
123 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

ical,  the  extant  material  does  not  allow  us 
to  construct  any  other. 

NOTE  ON  RECENT  RECONSTRUCTIONS  OF  "  q." 

Whether  the  contents  of  Q,  the  "  Logian  Source," 
can  be  safely  inferred  from  a  comparison  of  Mat- 
thew and  Luke,  is  a  question  at  issue  between  schol- 
ars, about  which  sufficient  has  been  already  said  in 
these  pages.  The  object  of  this  Note  is  merely  to 
exhibit  in  a  tabular  form  two  recent  attempts  at  re- 
construction, so  as  to  show  what  kind  of  document 
is  meant,  when  Q  is  named  in  modern  critical  dis- 
cussions. 

The  two  reconstructions  are  Professor  Harnack's 
("Spriiche  und  Reden  Jesu,"  1907)  and  Professor 
Stanton's  ("  The  Gospels  as  Historical  Documents,'* 
Part  ii,  Cambridge,  1909).  Harnack  constructs  Q 
from  59  or  60  sections  of  Matthew  and  Luke,  of 
varying  length,  and  discusses  the  wording  of  the 
several  passages  in  detail ;  with  regard  to  the  posi- 
tion of  the  more  important  passages  (here  numbered 
by  me  1-13)  he  declares  himself  practically  satisfied.1 
Stanton  confines  himself  almost  entirely  to  the  con- 
tents of  Q^,  i.  e.  his  reconstruction  does  not  attempt 
1  Spruche^  p.  126. 
124 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

to  settle  the  actual  wording  of   the  original  docu- 
ment. 

In  the  following  Table  I  give  Professor  Stanton's 
eight  main  divisions,  somewhat  shortening  his  titles 
of  the  sub-sections,  for  considerations  of  space.  For 
the  same  reason  I  give  only  the  references  to  Luke, 
in  the  order  of  which  Stanton  sees  approximately 
the  order  of  Q,  (p.  104).  The  right-hand  column 
contains  the  corresponding  sections  of  Harnack's  Q. 

Stanton,  pp.  102-103.   Harnack,  p.  126. 

I.  The  ushering  in  of  the  Ministry  of  Christ. 

John  the  Baptist  (Luke  iii.  3,  7-9,  16  f.).     \a 
The  Baptism  (Luke  iii.  21  f.).  \b 

The  Temptation  (Luke  iv.  1-13).  2 

II.  The  first  stage  in  the  preaching  of  the  Gospel. 

Character  of  heirs  of  the  Kingdom  (Luke 
vi.  17-49).  3" 

The  Centurion  of  Capernaum  (Luke  vii. 
1-10).  4 

Discourse  about  the  Baptist  (Luke  vii. 
18-28,  31-35).  6 

1  Note  that  Harnack's  3  is  larger  than  Stanton's  II :  it 
includes,  for  instance,  all  Stanton's  V. 

125 


SOURCES  FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

III.  The  extension  of  the  Gospel. 

Missionary  tour  (Luke  viii.  i).  [omitted] 

44  Foxes  have  holes,"  etc.  (Luke  ix.  57- 

60). 
Harvest  plenteous,  laborers  few  (Luke 

x.  2). 
Directions  to  preachers  (Luke  x.  3-12, 

16). 


51 


IV.  The  rejection  and  the  reception  of  Divine 

truth. 

44  Woe  to  thee,  Chorazin,"  etc.  (Luke 

x.  13-15)-  7 

44 1  thank  Thee,  Father,"  etc.  (Luke  x. 

21  f.).  8a 

44  Blessed  are  your  eyes,"  etc.  (Luke  x. 

V.  Instruction  on  Prayer. 

The  Lord's  Prayer  (Luke  xi.  2-4).     }^ar/5 
Be  earnest  in  prayer  (Luke  xi.  9-13).  X  ofz 

VI.  Jesus  and  his  antagonists* 

The  two  great  commandments  (Luke  x. 

25-28).  [omitted] 

1  Harnack's  5  is  larger  than  Stanton's  III :  see  below  on 
VII. 

126 


.1 


MATTHEW  AND  LUKE 

Beelzebub  (Luke  xi.  14  f.,  17-23). 
The  unclean  spirit  (Luke  xi.  24-26). 
The  Sign  of  Jonas  (Luke  xi.  16,  29-32).    10 
The  lamp  of  the  body  is  the  eye  (Luke 

xi.  34-36).  part  of  1 

"  Woe  to  you,  Pharisees!  "etc.  (Lukexi. 

39-52).  I I a 

VII.  Exhortations  to  disciples  in  view  of  the 
opposition  and  other  trials  that  awaited 
them. 
Confess    me   faithfully   (Luke   xii.    2- 

10).  part  of  $ 

Consider    the   ravens    (Luke   xii.    22- 

34).  part  of$ 

The  Son   of  Man  coming  as   a   thief" 

(Luke  xii.  39  f.). 
Act  as  a  prudent  steward  (Luke  xii. 

42-46). 
Divisions;    bear  the   cross    (Luke  xii. 

51-53,  xiv.  26  f.).  part  of  $ 

Mustard-seed   and  Leaven  (Luke  xiii. 

18-21).  ? 

Offences  (Luke  xvii.  1-4).  ? 

Faith  as  a  grain  of  mustard-seed  (Luke 

xvii.  5  f.).  ? 

127 


13 


SOURCES   FOR  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS 

VIII.  The  doom  on  Jerusalem  and  the  things  of 
the  end. 
"  Jerusalem,  Jerusalem  !"  etc.     (Luke 

xiii.  34  f.).  \\b 

The  Coming  of  the  Son  of  Man  (Luke 

xvii.  22-37).  12 

The  sections  marked  in  the  right-hand  column 
with  (?)  are  uncertain  in  position  according  to  Har- 
nack,  but  are  probably  to  be  inserted  very  much 
where  Stanton  puts  them.  Stanton's  reconstruction 
of  Q^  does  not  contain  Harnack's  §  14,  i.  e.  "  He 
that  hath,  to  him  shall  be  given,' '  followed  by  the 
saying  in  Luke  xxii.  28-30  (=  Matthew  xix.  28) 
about  sitting  on  twelve  thrones  judging  the  twelve 
tribes  of  Israel. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bacon,  B.  W.,  The  Beginnings  of  Gospel  Story  (Yale  Uni- 
versity Press,  1909).  [A  very  suggestive  historical  Com- 
mentary on  Mark.  The  most  scientific  exposition  in  Eng- 
lish of  the  anti-eschatological  point  of  view.] 

Burkitt,  F.  C,  The  Gospel  History  and  its  Transmission 
(Edinburgh,  2d  ed.,  1907).  [Attempts  to  show  why  the 
Church  preserved  an  account  of  the  foundation  of  Chris- 
tianity which  is  on  the  whole  historical.] 

Harnack,  A.,  Lukas  der  Artt  (Leipzig,  1906).  English 
translation,  Lithe  the  Physician,  vol.  xx  of  the  Crown 
Theological  Library  (London  and  New  York,  1907).  [A 
study  of  Luke,  the  companion  of  Paul,  and  of  his  writ- 
ings.] 

Harnack,  A.,  Sprtche  und  Reden  Jesu  (Leipzig,  1907). 
English  translation,  The  Sayings  of  Jesus,  vol.  xxiii 
of  the  Crown  Theological  Library  (London  and  New 
York,  1908).  [The  most  notable  attempt  to  reconstruct 

0..] 

Hawkins,  Sir  J.  C,  Horae  Synopticae  (Oxford,  2d  ed., 
1909).  [The  best  analysis  of  the  peculiarities  of  the  sev- 
eral Synoptic  Gospels,  the  various  Tables  being  arranged 
with  great  intelligence  as  well  as  accuracy.  Invaluable  for 
all  investigators  of  Synoptic  problems.] 

Lake,  K.,  The  Historical  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection 

of  Jesus  Christ,  vol.  xxi  of  the  Crown  Theological  Li- 

brary  (London  and  New  York,   1907).  [I  introduce  this 

book  here  as  the  first  example  in  original  English  work 

I29 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

of  the  doctrine  of  the  priority  of  Mark  being  consistently 
applied  throughout  a  historical  investigation.] 

Sanday,  W.,  The  Life  of  Christ  in  Recent  Research  (Ox- 
ford, 1907).  [Lectures,  giving  a  readable  survey  of  the 
last  twenty  years  of  research.] 

Schweitzer,  Albert,  Von  Reimarus  zu  Wrede  (Tubingen, 
1906).  [The  indispensable  account  of  the  attempt  to  write 
a  "Life  of  Jesus,"  from  the  posthumous  publication  of 
the  tracts  of  H.  S.  Reimarus  by  Lessing  in  1778  to  that 
of  the  late  Professor  W.  Wrede's "Messiah-secret"  in  190 1. 
Schweitzer  writes  from  a  strongly  eschatological  point 
of  view.  An  English  translation  by  W.  Montgomery,  to 
be  called  The  Quest  of  the  Historical  Jesus,  will  be  pub- 
lished in  London  early  in  1910.] 

Stanton,  V.  H.,  The  Gospels  as  Historical  Documents, 
Part  II  (Cambridge,  1909).  [A  valuable  and  very  full 
study  of  the  Synoptic  Problem.] 

Wellhausen,  J.,  Einleitung  in  die  drei  ersten  Evangelien 
(Berlin,  1905).  —  Das  Evangelium  Marci  (Berlin,  1903; 
2d.  ed.,  1909). — Das  Evangelium  Matthaei  (Berlin, 
1904).  —  Das  Evangelium  Lucae  (Berlin,  1904).  —  [These 
four  books  practically  form  one  short  Commentary  on 
the  Synoptic  Gospels,  with  an  Introduction  prefixed.  The 
fresh  German  translations  of  the  Gospels  themselves, 
the  running  commentary,  and  the  introductory  remarks, 
are  all  singularly  acute  and  stimulating.] 

I  cannot  close  this  short  Bibliography  without  remarking 
that  those  who  wish  to  study  Synoptic  questions  should 
prepare  themselves  by  underlining,  whether  in  a  Greek  or 
an  English  New  Testament,  those  words  and  sentences  of 
Matthew  and  Luke  that  are  found  in  Mark.  The  student 
should  distinguish  what  is  common  to  all  three,  what  is 
common  to  Matthew  and  Mark  only,  what  is  common  to 

130 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Luke  and  Mark  only,  what  is  common  to  Matthew  and 
Luke  only.  There  are  several  "Harmonies"  and  "Synop- 
ses "  on  the  market,  some  of  which  are  very  well  arranged. 
But  the  grasp  of  the  details  of  the  subject  which  the  student 
gains  by  marking  the  full  unabridged  texts  for  himself  is 
worth  all  the  Synopses  that  ever  were  compiled. 


(£bt  niUcrjiDc  pre** 

CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .   A 


MODERN 

RELIGIOUS 

PROBLEMS 


EDITED  BY 

DR.  AMBROSE  W.  VERNON 


For  a  long  time  there  has  been  an  atmosphere  of 
uncertainty  in  the  religious  realm.  This  uncertainty 
has  been  caused  by  the  widespread  knowledge  that 
modern  scholarship  has  modified  the  traditional  con- 
ceptions of  the  Christian  religion,  and  particularly  by 
widespread  ignorance  of  the  precise  modifications  to 
which  modern  scholarship  has  been  led. 

The  aim  of  this  series  of  books  is  to  lay  before  the 
great  body  of  intelligent  people  in  the  English-speak- 
ing world  the  precise  results  of  this  scholarship,  so 
that  men  both  within  and  without  the  churches  may 
be  able  to  understand  the  conception  of  the  Christian 
religion  (and  of  its  Sacred  Books)  which  obtains 
among  its  leading  scholars  to-day,  and  that  they  may 
intelligently  cooperate  in  the  great  practical  problems 
with  which  the  churches  are  now  confronted. 

While  at  many  a  point  divergent  views  are  cham- 
pioned, it  has  become  apparent  in  the  last  few  years 
that  it  is  possible  to  speak  of  a  consensus  of  opinion 
among  the  leading  scholars  of  England  and  America, 
who  have,  in  general,  adopted  the  modern  point  of 


The  publishers  and  editor  congratulate  themselves 
that  this  consensus  of  opinion  may  be  presented  to 
the  public  not  by  middle-men,  but  by  men  who  from 
their  position  and  attainment  are  recognized  through- 
out the  English  Protestant  world  as  among  those  best 
able  to  speak  with  authority  on  the  most  important 
subjects  which  face  intelligent  religious  men  to-day. 
It  is  a  notable  sign  of  the  times  that  these  eminent 
specialists  have  gladly  consented  to  pause  in  their  de- 
tailed research,  in  order  to  acquaint  the  religious 
public  with  the  results  of  their  study. 

Modern  Religious  Problems  are  many,  but  they 
fall  chiefly  under  one  of  the  four  divisions  into  which 
this  series  of  books  is  to  be  divided :  — 

I.   The  Old  Testament. 
II.   The  New  Testament. 

III.  Fundamental  Christian  Conceptions. 

IV.  Practical  Church  Problems. 

Under  these  four  main  divisions  the  most  vital 
problems  will  be  treated  in  short,  concise,  clear  vol- 
umes. They  will  leave  technicalities  at  one  side  and 
they  will  be  published  at  a  price  which  will  put  the 
assured  results  of  religious  scholarship  within  the 
reach  of  all. 

The  volumes  already  arranged  for  are  the  following : 

I.   OLD  TESTAMENT 

"THE    ORIGIN    AND     DEVELOPMENT    OF    THE 
LAW."     By  Canon  S.  R.  DRIVER,  Oxford  University. 

"HOW  WE  GOT  OUR  OLD  TESTAMENT." 

By  Professor  WILLIAM  R.  ARNOLD,  Andover  Semin- 
ary. 

-THE  PRIMITIVE  RELIGION  OF  ISRAEL." 

By  Professor  L.  B.  PATON,  Hartford  Theological  Semi»» 
ary. 


II.   NEW  TESTAMENT 

"THE  EARLIEST  SOURCES  FOR  THE  LirE  OP 
JESUS."  By  Professor  F.  C.  BURKITT,  Cambridge  Uni- 
versity, England.     (Now  Ready.) 

••THE   MIRACLES  OF  JESUS." 

By  Professor  F.  C.  PORTER,  Yale  Unirersity. 

-THE   FOUNDING  OF  THE  CHURCH." 

By  Professor  B.  W.  BACON,  Yale  Unirersity.  (Now 
Ready.) 

•HOW  WE  GOT  OUR  NEW  TESTAMENT." 
By  Professor  J.  H.  ROPES,  Harvard  University. 

•PAUL  AND   PAULINISM." 

By  Rev.  JAMES  MOFFATT,  D.  D.,  Broughty  Ferry, 
Forfarshire,  Scotland.   (Now  Ready.) 

"THE  HISTORICAL  AND  RELIGIOUS  VALUE  OF 
THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL."  By  Professor  E.  F.  SCOTT, 
Queen's  University,  Kingston.    (Now  Ready.) 

"THE  BIRTH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  OUR 
LORD."  By  Professor  WILLIAM  H.  RYDER,  of  And- 
over  Seminary,  Cambridge,  Mass. 

III.   FUNDAMENTAL   CHRISTIAN 
CONCEPTIONS 

••THE  GOSPEL  OF  JESUS." 

By  Professor  G.  W.  KNOX,  Union  Theological  Seminary. 
New  York.  With  General  Introduction  to  the  Series.  (Now 
Ready.) 

•THE  GOD  OF  THE  CHRISTIAN." 

By  Professor  A.  C.  McGIFFERT,  Union  Theological  Sera- 
inary. 

•SIN  AND  ITS   FORGIVENESS." 

By  President  WILLIAM  DeW.  HYDE,  Bowdoia  Colleft. 
(Now  Ready.) 

"THE  PERSON  OF  JESUS." 

By  President  H.  C.  KING,  Oberlin  College. 

•THE   AUTHORITY  OF  THE   SCRIPTURES." 

By  Professor  SHAILER  MATHEWS,  University  of  Chi- 
cago. 


IV.   PRACTICAL  CHURCH   PROBLEMS 

"THE  PLACE  OF  THE  CHURCH  IN  MODERN 
SOCIETY."  By  WM.  JEWETT  TUCKER,  Ex-Jpresi- 
dent  of  Dartmouth  College. 

"THE  CHURCH  AND  LABOR." 

By  CHARLES  STELZLE,  Superintendent  of  Department 
of  the  Church  and  Labor  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  of  the 
United  States.    (Now  Ready.) 

"THE  ADJUSTMENT  OF  THE  BIBLE  SCHOOLS 
TO  MODERN  NEEDS."  By  Professor  CHARLES  F. 
KENT,  Yale  University. 

"THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  CHILD." 

By  Rev.  HENRY  SLOANE  COFFIN,  Madison  Art. 
Presbyterian  Church,  New  York  City. 

"THE  PRESENTATION  OF  RELIGION  TO  EDU- 
CATED MEN."  By  Rev.  GEORGE  HODGES,  D.  D., 
Dean  of  the  Episcopal  Theological  School,  Cambridge, 
Mass. 

The  general  editor  of  the  series,  Rev.  Ambrose 
White  Vernon,  is  a  graduate  of  Princeton  University 
(1891)  and  of  Union  Theological  Seminary  (1894). 
After  two  years  more  of  study  in  Germany,  on  a  fel- 
lowship, he  had  an  experience  of  eight  years  in  the 
pastorate,  at  Hiawatha,  Kansas,  and  East  Orange, 
New  Jersey.  From  1904  to  1907  he  was  professor  of 
Biblical  literature  in  Dartmouth  College,  and  then 
professor  of  practical  theology  at  Yale  till  the  present 
year,  when  he  returned  to  the  pastorate,  succeeding 
the  late  Dr.  Reuen  Thomas  at  Harvard  Church, 
Brookline,  one  of  the  leading  churches  of  metropoli- 
tan Boston.  Dartmouth  College  gave  him  the  de- 
gree of  D.  D.  in  1907. 

The  volumes  are  attractively  bound  in  cloth.    Thin 
l2tnoy  each  jo  cents  net.    Postage  J  cents. 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
4  Park  St.,  Boston  :  85  Fifth  Ave.,  New  York 


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